


It's Not Fire You Want to Ignite

by minnabird



Series: Ignite 'verse [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Developing Relationship, F/M, Jedi Leia Organa, Mild Sexual Content, Politics, Skywalker Family Feels, Slavery, Space Battles, Time Travel, actually explicitly Not Jedi Leia but she uses a lightsaber
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-26 21:20:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21955516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minnabird/pseuds/minnabird
Summary: “The Jedi have a set of sayings,” Leia said, her voice low. “Something they’re supposed to live by.There is no emotion, there is peace; there is no ignorance, there is knowledge; there is no passion, there is serenity…”Han raised an eyebrow. “I haven't known you long, but I’d say you’re a pretty passionate lady.”Her lips quirked at that, though she still looked troubled. “I’ll do more good as a politician than a Jedi Knight."On the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, Leia Skywalker receives a message from another version of herself: one whose actions stopped Palpatine before he could become Emperor. She tasks her with finding Han Solo.Leia finds more than she bargained for out there. Han is infuriating and intriguing in equal measure. And there are horrors far too close to home. She thought she had found the best path to make the galaxy better, but she begins to think that peace is not the same thing as justice. The question is: who will fight with her?
Relationships: Leia Organa/Han Solo
Series: Ignite 'verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1582570
Comments: 39
Kudos: 73





	1. The Message

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas! This is the first chapter of a fic I've been working on since October. I've got a bit of backlog ready, so I'm hoping to start posting this weekly. Probably expect the next one Tuesday evening.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has listened to me ramble about this thing so far - the Cantina crew, Twitter, SW Big Bang folks, Hyper. And especially thanks to Stars, who generously offered to beta and has been happily lending an ear while I freak out about this fic.

Leia assessed her reflection in the mirror critically. Her hair was pinned to the back of her head in an elaborate tumble of small braids studded with silver ornaments. Embroidered flowers glinted in matching silver at the high collar and gathered cuffs of her dress. Usually, when she was off-duty, she preferred more practical garb, but tonight was a special occasion.

Outside, the city hummed with the energy of traffic and anticipation. The sun had set, and the Coruscant night was getting underway. Leia would be joining them in an hour; she had reservations at a favorite dinner spot with her twin brother.

Though they had both called Coruscant home since they were small, they had lived very different lives for the last eight years. While Leia spent her fair share of time in Coruscant’s restaurants, concert halls, and the better class of bars, Luke had been busy and often off-world as a Jedi apprentice. Their twenty-fourth birthday was tomorrow, and Luke had just been knighted. Tonight was a celebration as well as an acknowledgement: the Skywalker twins had settled into their adult lives, and there was only bright future ahead.

Her door chimed, and Leia went to open it. “Bail!” she said in surprise.

He kissed her cheek, smiling, tucking the wrapped box he held against his side. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything, my dear.”

“No. I have some time.” She pulled away and waved him into a seat. She settled into hers gracefully, though inside she felt exactly as she had at four or fourteen years old at a surprise visit from a beloved uncle.

“This isn’t Breha’s and my gift to you,” he said after they had exchanged pleasantries. He held up the box – it was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand – but didn’t offer it to her yet. “But it comes with a tale, if you have the time.”

“A tale?” she said. There was a more serious undercurrent to this than Bail’s manner suggested. It hummed just under his skin, a tangle of worry and grim memory and warmth. She settled back to let him tell it.

“Many years ago, I met a remarkable woman who told me an even more remarkable story.” The familiar dark eyes crinkled, and he gestured with the box. He seemed to catch himself, then set it in his lap, smoothing the paper. “She came to Alderaan and found Breha and me. Snuck into the royal wing, actually, and gave us all a fright.”

“When was this?”

“Before you were born. At the height of the Clone Wars, about a year before Palpatine…”

“And no one shot her?” Leia said dryly.

Bail shook his head. “She wasn’t offering violence. I think she just wanted to be home. What she told us was that she was our daughter, or would be.”

“But you don’t….” Leia cut herself off, wincing.

“No, we don’t.” Bail was calm and steady as ever. “She was a traveler. Not from another planet, but from another time. From our future, in fact, just about now.”

If Leia hadn’t already been sitting, she would have needed to do so immediately. Even if it hadn’t been Bail, who wouldn’t play this kind of trick, there was something else… Something tugged at her, the Force-intuition that had only gotten stronger as she got older. It whispered _truth_ in her ear as goosebumps prickled all along her body.

“Who?” she asked, already half-knowing the answer.

Bail stood, then, and came to her. He knelt in front of her chair, taking her hand, his eyes warm and knowing. “You,” he said simply. His lips twitched. “But not _you_. A woman who grew up in a very different galaxy, and dreamed of one like this.”

 _How?_ should be the first question on her lips, but instead she found herself breathing, “Why?”

Bail considered. “I suspect you’ll find the answer in her own words,” he said at last. “She was desperate. She grew up with war and terror and death.”

“ _I_ grew up with war and fear,” Leia said.

Bail looked at her. Gently, he said, “Compared with your sister, yes. I know your parents would have preferred to keep you with them rather than sending you to the Temple. You feared for your parents once you were old enough to understand.

“But we did stop the war. We did knit the Republic back together. Smaller, yes, and we’re still trying to smooth those scars, but we came through. As did your family.” He squeezed her hand. “Her parents’ Republic became an Empire the year she was born. The Jedi were hunted down; Padmé Amidala died; Anakin Skywalker disappeared. She and Luke grew up on two separate ends of the galaxy, and she never knew she had a brother until just before she came to us.”

Her whole world, then, she thought numbly: her whole world had burned before she even got to know it. Even in the most frightening, confusing period of her childhood, she always had Luke. After a moment, she remembered something. “You said she was your daughter? _I_ was?”

The look on Bail’s face was…complicated. Leia reached delicately for his Force signature, but even that was hard to parse. “We adopted you,” he said finally, and there was pain there, but love, too. Wistfulness for a situation that Bail would never truly want.

“She must have loved you,” Leia said, knowing how fiercely she felt for her own family.

“She did,” Bail said simply. “And I think I loved her too, by the time she traveled home. And I love you,” he added, with something more like humor coloring his tone. “But not because you’re her. Because I had the privilege of watching you grow up. Of helping, even a little.” 

“Oh, Bail.” Leia leaned forward, wrapping her arms around Bail in a brief, tight hug. “I love you, too.”

He chucked her chin and stood. “Open her gift when you have a free day or so. She gave it to me for your twenty-fourth birthday.”

“Do you know what it is?”

Bail grinned at her. “She called it a message in a bottle.”

* * *

Leia tried to put it from her mind.

Luke was a better distraction than the light meditation she had attempted in the back of the speeder. He looked every bit the Jedi Knight: the Padawan braid was gone, and he had dressed in a black tabard and tunic that made him look like old holopics of their father. He grinned through dinner, clearly proud of himself and easily drawn into chatter. Leia let his happiness wash over her, so proud of him herself that she could burst.

She had thought her preoccupation well-covered, but after the server had cleared their plates, Luke put a hand on her wrist. “What’s the matter?”

“How do you always know?” Leia asked softly. He just gave her a serious look, half stubbornness and half compassion. “Don’t do the Jedi face,” she said, and spilled the whole thing.

“Have you ever even heard of something like that? Going back in time?” Leia asked.

Luke looked thoughtful. “No,” he said. “But…we know the Force isn’t limited by time like we are. That’s why we get visions, and prophecies.”

Leia nodded, rubbing her forehead. “I never liked the mystical stuff,” she admitted, and chuckled. “Never thought it meant much to my life.”

“Well, the Force has a way of catching up with you.” Luke grinned at her. “Besides, didn’t you ever wonder about Dad’s prophecy?”

“The Chosen One thing?” Leia shook her head. “All I know is no one seems sure if he actually brought balance to the Force or not. There aren’t any Sith anymore, so…” She shrugged. “It seems pretty moot to me.”

“We could always ask Master Plo about it,” Luke said. “Maybe he could take a look.”

“No.” Leia was suddenly certain she didn’t want that. Even if her brother’s trust in his now-former Master was endearing, this was…private. “I’m going to start looking through it tonight.”

On their way out, Luke said, “I’ll give you a ride home, if you want.” Leia didn’t bother to call him out on the obviousness of this ploy. If she didn’t want his company, she could just say no. But truth be told, she didn’t want to approach this alone.

“I didn’t even open it,” she told Luke as she let them into her apartment. She hung up her cape and made a beeline for her desk, where she had left the wrapped box. She turned, holding it, and blew out a slow breath. “So.”

Luke settled cross-legged, sideways on the sofa facing her, and Leia moved to sit across from him. With quick, jerky movements, she pulled the paper from the box. It was made of scuffed metal, and inside was… a chip for a holoprojector.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Leia said.

Luke looked around and spotted her handheld projector. He reached out a hand and caught it as it flew towards him. Leia took it and slotted the chip in. It took a moment for the device to recognize the chip and process its contents, then it popped up a list of files. Leia scrolled through, frowning. The filenames were just strings of dates and times. They were all spread out over a single week, less than a month before Luke and she had been born.

“Start from the beginning?” Luke suggested. Leia nodded, and pressed a button, holding tightly to the holoprojector as blue light flickered to life.

* * *

“Leia. I hope you’re still called Leia, anyway.” Leia smiled at the recorder, feeling completely foolish. This brought a whole new meaning to talking to herself. “I hope you’re having a good birthday; this is supposed to get to you on our next one. And no, that doesn’t make any sense. But I figure if I’m twenty-three, twenty-four-year-old you will be past any danger of being me.” Her smile faltered. “I should start from the beginning.”

 _“I have to tell you something before I go,” Luke said. He and Leia were huddled together in the_ Falcon _’s communal area. They had stayed here even after the lights dimmed for the night cycle, neither ready to go to bed. At some point, Luke had wrapped his hands around hers. They were warm and calloused and familiar, a comfort against whatever came next._

_“What is it?” Leia prompted. Luke wouldn’t meet her eyes; he seemed to be searching their hands for his next words._

_“That pull between us – I know you’ve felt it too.” His hands tightened on hers when she tried to jerk them away._

_“Han,” she protested, her voice ragged, too loud in the space between them._

_“No,” he said. “It’s all right. Not like that.” His thumb rubbed over the side of her hand, and miraculously, she relaxed. She knew, if she thought about it, that he hadn’t looked at her with that kind of speculation in some time._

_“Then what?” she asked._

_“My father,” Luke said, “had another child. My sister.”_

_“Me,” Leia said, and everything else was swept away in the rightness of it. She smiled; something inside her sang, telling her the truth and the joy of this revelation._

_Her smile cut off abruptly, though, as the other truths followed. Until tonight, she had had no family left. Now, she had a brother, and a father._

_Her father had held her back while she watched everything she loved burn._

_Tomorrow, her brother would throw himself at a chance so desperate, she might never see him again._

_And somehow, she was supposed to go on alone again, gathering every last scrap they had to fight this Rebellion. Luke could fail and be lost; even if he did succeed, who knew how or when things would change?_

_“You have the strength to fight here,” Luke said, lifting her chin. There was that new, strange calm in his eyes, and it quieted her grief for a moment._

_“I know,” she said, smiling a little. She pulled her hands away at last, only to wrap her arms around Luke. “I’ll fight my battle, and you’ll fight yours,” she said. “We’ll meet on the other side, somehow.”_

_Luke pressed a kiss to her forehead and held her tight, and somehow that was answer enough._

“I’ve been fighting a war for a very long time. All my life, in some ways. The galaxy is under the oppressive rule of an Empire. We in the Rebellion always hoped to end that rule, but things were bad and getting worse. In our darkest hour, some of our allies on Lothal sent us some intel that could change everything.” She still hoped it would change everything. “There’s an old Jedi Temple there, and in it is a portal. A way to access paths between all the moments of time that had been, and that would ever be.”

She took a breath. “The plan was for Luke to go through. Luke…Luke is one of the few Jedi we have now. We thought if anyone had a chance of using it well, it was him. But then Darth Vader showed up.” She thought a moment, then shook her head. “I hope you never have to find out who Darth Vader is. Here, he’s the opposite of everything a Jedi is, and only a Jedi like Luke could hold him off. There was no choice; I had to go instead.”

She was seized again by the panic she had felt as Luke, sliding backwards as he locked blades with Vader, gasped, “Leia! Go!”

_“No! It has to be you!” Leia rose from cover to aim a few shots at the Stormtroopers that had followed Vader. Two crumpled, and she ducked back down._

_“I can’t stop him following if I go through,” Luke said. They disengaged, but Vader was back in a blur of red, more ferocious than ever. Luke was losing ground, barely keeping up. “Go! Go now!”_

“I didn’t know what I was doing; I can’t describe what it was like. But I…something guided me. I don’t know how. Luke is the one who had Jedi training; I don’t even know if it’s possible that I’m like him. But whatever it was, the Force, or love, or just wanting it so badly, I found my way to the place that will always be my home.”

Leia looked out the window. The view of Aldera, with Appenza Peak purple and benevolent in the background, still made her heart soar at odd moments. “I don’t know what your name is,” she said softly, slow to pull her gaze back to the holorecorder. “But I am and always will be Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan. I would have followed my mother as Queen. Convincing Bail and Breha of that, when I turned up in their home unannounced, was another story.”

She had been frightened and off-balance from her strange journey, and the sight of her parents looking so young had sent her reeling again. It had taken all of her wits and willpower to get through that first encounter. But there were some things even a spy couldn’t know about Bail and Breha Organa, but that their daughter did.

“But I didn’t come here for reunions, however wonderful those might be. I came here to stop the Emperor and Vader before they rose to power. I don’t know how Luke would have done it, but I’ve approached it the only way I know how. I’ve been organizing a rebellion, before there’s even an Empire to rebel against. But even if it succeeds, I don’t know where that leaves me. I don’t know where that leaves _you_ , or anyone else I know in the world you live in. So that’s where these recordings come in.”

Leia waved a hand at the holorecorder and thought a moment. She hadn’t organized her thoughts ahead of time, didn’t know if she was really going to find a way to pass these on to herself. They planned to move in a week, and even if she managed not to be killed, even if she didn’t pop out of existence because she had changed too much, she was going to try to step back through the portal on Lothal.

And she had no idea if she’d have a world to go back to.

She made a decision.

“First, I’m going to tell you what I’ve done here. Not secret intel, but how things have been for me, because I want someone to remember these months. And then I’m going to have a mission for you.”

* * *

  
_IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Leia with her hair in a braided crown and in practical clothing facing Leia in a fancy dress and more elaborate tumble of braids across the blue beam of a holoprojector  
[click for full image](https://minnarr.tumblr.com/post/612726747265417216/he-chucked-her-chin-and-stood-open-her-gift-when) _

* * *

Leia blinked at Queen Parahar, who emanated expectant satisfaction even through the washed-out blue of the hologram.

“This is a very great honor, Your Highness. May I have time to consider?” she asked.

“Of course, Lady Skywalker.”

Leia sat still and dignified through the Queen of Naboo’s agreement and goodbyes, but as soon as the hologram flickered out, she stood and flung herself from her tiny office.

“Lunch,” she said, smiling at the startled assistant as she left. But she didn’t need food. She needed the action, the moving meditation, of saber practice.

It wasn’t a long speeder ride to the Temple, but far enough that Leia would feel guilty later, once she had centered herself. It did no one good for her to pace the carpet in her office to threads when there was nothing more pressing to do, though. She strode into a training salle, realized she didn’t have her lightsaber with her, and laughed. What was her life?

There was a footstep in the door, and then a voice called, “Here.”

Leia spun, stretching out a hand just in time to catch a solid weight. She flipped the training saber upright in her grip and smirked across at the figure in the door. “Hello, Caleb. Missing your sparring partner?”

Caleb Dume came forward to meet her with a playful bow. Today, he was clean-cut in a casual white tunic and brown leggings, the top section of his hair pulled back into a knot while the rest was allowed to fall to his shoulders. In the field, he more often dressed like a hard-bitten spacer. He had been Depa Billaba's Padawan before Leia, and at age thirteen, she had worshipped him. He had treated her in turn like a funny little sister. These days, they were close friends despite the difference in age.

He met her smirk with a tilt of his head. “I dunno. You might be getting out of practice—”

His blade came up to meet hers in a clash of sound and light, and she laughed as she sprang away. They moved together easily, dancing as much as challenging each other. She lost herself in the play of action and reaction and the song of the Force.

As they sat sharing a water bottle after, Leia asked, “Do you ever wonder if you made the right choice?”

Caleb did her the courtesy of giving the question honest thought. “Always,” he said. “But I had to learn to let go of the what-ifs and just try to make the best choice next time. Why? There a particular one you’re questioning?”

“The big one,” Leia said. She tilted her head back. “They want to put me on the Senate floor.”

After a moment, Caleb said, “Scared?”

Leia laughed. “More like…the way you feel when you sense a trap. Once I take this appointment, I don't think I'll ever be able to step away.”

“Did you start on this path for duty, or love?”

“Shouldn’t it be both?” Leia said.

“I dunno. Should it?” Caleb ignored her glare. “I can't choose your path for you. I can sympathize, though. Life dumped a lot of expectations on you. And Leia? Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart…” He squeezed her shoulder, smiling into her eyes for a beat. “You are out of practice.”

She punched him in the shoulder. As he rubbed at it, mock-hurt, she grumbled, “At least I've got people like you to keep me humble, huh?”

* * *

Luke set a cup of caf next to her elbow, and Leia jerked awake. For the last week, Luke had come by every evening, and they had watched a little more of the recordings. Tonight, they had started to hit the slide towards the end, and instead of parting for bed at a reasonable time, they kept going.

Leia’s story came in fragments and disconnected anecdotes, in tangents explaining things that had happened in her past, and sometimes in conversation with Bail or Breha, who seemed to have found out about the recordings halfway through their creation.

They had finished all but one of the files. Dawn was slowly coming to Coruscant, sneaking fingers above and through the many layers of the city. As Luke sat again, cradling his own cup of caf, he looked at her. “Last one?” he said.

Leia just leaned forward and pressed play.

There had been a gathering urgency in Leia Organa as they worked their way through the files, and by the penultimate file, it felt like the air before a storm. The holo blinked on, showing just Leia, but she looked calm. It was a kind of calm Leia recognized: the sort that came when there was no more preparation to do, nothing new to worry about, only the need to accept and work through whatever came next.

“This last one is a short one,” the other Leia said, her voice soft. “It’s tomorrow, I think, and before we go, there’s that mission I promised you.” She took a breath. “I love these people. I hope you have the people I’m with now; if you’re hearing this, you at least have Bail and Breha. What I need you to do is find the people I came here to fight for.” She leaned in, a wisp of hair escaping and falling against her cheek. “You know I have a brother. If you don’t know him, you need to find him.”

On the sofa, Leia slid her hand through the crook of Luke’s elbow, nudging him with her shoulder as the other Leia went on.

“Luke grew up on Tatooine. He had family there – an Uncle Owen, an Aunt Beru. The Lars family.”

Beside her, Luke shifted. “Strange to think about growing up there.”

The recorded Leia came to a stop, and seemed to gather herself. “And there’s one more person. I haven’t talked about him on these recordings. He’s not connected to this history the way Luke is, but he’s…he’s important.” Her chin tensed, as if she felt she had to defend this position. “He’s a Corellian smuggler by the name of Han Solo. If you’re anything like me, you’ll hate him at first. If he’s anything like him, it’ll be worth getting to know him anyway.”

Luke was doing that head tilt that meant he wished he knew how to raise an eyebrow, and Leia had gone still. She knew how the other Leia’s smile felt when she was wearing it. _She’s in love with him,_ she thought. _Or something like it._

Leia was half-certain she was going to ignore this other self’s mission. Even if she wanted to find some stranger another version of herself had fallen for, it sounded nearly impossible. Every detail Leia laid out could have changed.

But then Leia Organa looked into the recorder, and Leia felt pinned by that gaze. There was fire in that gaze, and a determination she recognized, forged harder and sharper by the other Leia’s experiences. “Please,” she said. “Please find them. I won’t lose another family.”

Leia fell back against the sofa as the projector spun back to the file list. “She’s asking me to find one particular grain of sand on all of Tatooine,” she said.

“You’re going to do it?” All hint of teasing was gone from Luke’s face. “You think it’s that important?”

“I think she thought it was,” Leia said. “And I want to know why.”


	2. Home and Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leia returns home to Naboo, where her father offers both insight and aid. Their plans do not survive contact with Han Solo.

Leia’s eyes found her father immediately when she stepped off the transport. He raised a hand and stood up, waiting until the crowd cleared out and Leia could walk forward to meet him.

“Hey, kid,” he said, ruffling her hair.

She gave her usual half-hearted protest, then let herself be pulled into a one-armed hug. She looked him over as they pulled apart, mentally comparing him to old holos she had seen. He kept his hair long, that hadn’t changed since the days of the war, but these days he tended towards a civilian’s work clothes in neutral colors. He didn’t look like a war hero, but he didn’t look…stretched, either, as he had late in the war.

“What? Is there something on my face?”

“No,” Leia said. She grinned at him. “You didn’t come straight from the shop this time.”

They loaded her things into the speeder together and Leia watched as they left the spaceport and the town behind, zipping along a road that wound through meadows and banks of trees. It was springtime on Naboo, and the Lake Country was covered in flowers. Leia hadn’t spent much of her life here, but it was still home, and it was good to see it again.

“Was Mom able to get home?” Leia asked.

Anakin shook his head, keeping his eyes on the road. “Sorry, kid. The Assembly just kicked off their session, and her week’s packed.”

“It’s okay. It wasn’t a planned visit.”

She could feel her father’s eyes on the side of her head. “Not that I’m not happy to see you, but…”

“It’s not like me to take off without advance planning and just descend on you? I know. It’s nothing bad, I promise, just…different.”

“Anything to do with that promotion I heard about?”

Leia let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “And how did you hear about that?”

“I’m not married to your mother for nothing.” Anakin looked sideways at her. “Junior representative. That’s pretty big. Naboo hasn’t had someone on the Senate floor since, well…”

“Since Mom stepped down.” Leia sighed. “I think it’s a step forward. I don’t know if I’m ready to do it, or if everyone’s just so used to the idea of our family in office.”

“Padmé doesn’t think she was ready for any of what she did as Queen,” Anakin said. “Even as Senator. She had similar thoughts, and look how she did.”

“I don’t know if that’s a good thing.” Leia frowned, looking at Anakin. “People see her differently on Coruscant than they do here. On Naboo, they remember the Invasion, and her courage in defending her people. On Coruscant, they still see Palpatine’s dupe, even after all these years.”

Anakin’s face darkened. “She wasn’t Palpatine’s dupe. Not any more than the rest of the Senate. Just look at what she did once she saw him taking real power!”

“Dad.” Leia placed a hand on Anakin’s where it was clenched on the steering yoke. “I know that.”

Anakin took a deep breath, visibly calming himself. “I know. I’m sorry. It just… It still makes me so...angry. I still think the Queen shouldn’t have backed down and given up the Senate seat. Padmé deserved better. They still don’t realize that she saved them.”

“Things have changed even since I started working in the Senator’s office,” Leia said. “We’re earning back trust, little by little. I think letting Karlinus select the senator for our sector went a long way in easing people’s fears.”

“No one paid attention to Naboo when it needed them,” Anakin muttered. “Only when one man from Naboo got too powerful and became a threat.”

“And a lot of people here were happy for him to gain power,” Leia pointed out. “It was easier for the Senate to turn on Naboo. I don’t think it’s right, I just have to deal with it.”

“This is why you and your mother are the ones in politics,” Anakin said. “I just want to yell at everyone till they listen.”

Leia laughed. “And you think I don’t?”

* * *

It didn’t take too long to get from town to their house. Mercifully, her sister was out doing whatever sixteen-year-olds did on afternoons when there was no school the next day. It meant she was able to settle in on the terrace with Anakin to talk right away.

It was hard to know how to approach this. Finally, she settled for the thing she was most curious about. “Do you remember, a few months before the Palpatine Crisis, that a woman came to stay with the Organas?”

Anakin sat bolt upright. “One of them told you about her?” he said, his eyebrows coming together hard. Leia stilled a moment, as much at the sudden tension in the air as at Anakin’s expression.

“She left me something,” she said. “Kind of a holovid diary. Bail just brought it to me.” Leia looked him over, trying to understand his reaction. “Did you…did you know who she really was?” she asked after a moment.

“Um.” Anakin rubbed a hand over his mouth. He visibly gathered himself and met her eyes. “She didn’t tell me much. Or Padmé, really. But she said some things, and the Force made a few nudges, and I kind of figured.” He gestured at her. “Also, you look just like her.”

“So you didn’t name me after myself,” Leia said drily.

“We didn’t name any of you after anybody,” Anakin said. “Padmé had her heart set on Leia long before, uh, you showed up.”

They looked at each other for a few seconds, and Leia had to fight down the urge to laugh. “This is so strange,” she finally admitted.

“You’re telling me.” Anakin scrubbed a hand through his hair, letting out a slow breath. “Okay. So you got a weird birthday present. Why does that bring you here?”

Leia pulled her holoprojector out of her pocket and laid it on the table between them. It flicked on, showing a still image of a man in his late teens. It was an intake photo from a naval academy, taken nineteen years ago. His time there was the only trace of Han Solo Leia had been able to find on her own.

She had been startled by the image, when she first saw it. First, he looked not much younger than she did now; the other Leia had not mentioned his age. Second, despite the stiffness of the pose and his new uniform, something in Han Solo’s gaze blazed defiance.

“I need to find this man,” she told her father. “I wasn’t able to get much.” She laid out what the other Leia had told her about her version of Solo. “I was able to find his military record. He started training at Carida Academy eight years after the war began. His scores on starfighter training exercises were…impressive. Two years later, he was dismissed from the Academy for theft. Apparently he was making extra money selling off small parts and fuel.” Leia shook her head. Her other self had been right: she wasn’t impressed.

“Can’t imagine they let him off with just a dismissal,” Anakin said, frowning. “That would’ve been around the end of the war, but it was still wartime. If he sold any of that to enemies of the Republic…”

“They didn’t let him off. He was supposed to face criminal charges, but…” Leia shrugged. “Records show he stole a fighter, escaped from his pursuers, and the fighter was later found abandoned in a spaceport on Taanab. That’s the last I could find on him.” She smiled at Anakin. “And that’s where I’m hoping you come in.”

Her father was clearly already chewing over the problem, but he still looked at her wryly. “Where I come in?”

“I don’t have the experience you do,” Leia said. “I’ve spent my time with politicians and diplomats and people generally working within the law. I don’t know where to begin looking for a smuggler who clearly doesn’t want to be found. I’m not asking you to come with me—”

“Like hell you aren’t,” Anakin snorted. “I’m not sending you to every smuggler’s paradise I know alone.”

“Dad, you’ve got Sisi to think of. I could take someone else; Caleb’s got Outer Rim experience.”

“Caleb Dume is a fine Jedi, but he’d need Council authorization for an extended trip. Besides, I think I know the Outer Rim better than he does.” Anakin crossed his arms. Leia met him glare for glare. After a few moments of this, he added, “I’ll take Sisi to Sola till Padmé gets back. We’ve done it before, she won’t mind.”

“Fine.” Leia had been worried about more than childcare. Sisi was old enough to stay on her own if she had to, but Leia was protective of her to a ridiculous degree. Sisi Skywalker, born as the Clone Wars ended, was the one who got to have a normal childhood. Among other things, this meant that she usually had at least one parent home with her, seeing her off to school, making and eating meals together, all of the everyday things Leia had missed for most of her life. Most days, she wasn’t bitter about the path she had walked, but she wanted Sisi never to have to imagine life without her family around her.

But this wasn’t a life-or-death mission, and it wasn’t even particularly dangerous by Anakin’s standards. It was only dangerous to Leia because of her inexperience with the worlds involved, though she was sure she could muddle through on her own if she had to.

“Besides, you’re going to need a pilot,” Anakin said, brightening. “And a ship.”

“Oh, no,” Leia said, minutes later, when her father showed her what he had in mind. Tucked behind a stand of trees, he kept a big ugly hangar they had always called ‘the shop.’ He did repairs on speeders, small crafts, droids, and even agricultural equipment for credits, but he always had at least one passion project going.

Anakin had led her around the side, this time, to a bulk behind the shop. The ship’s profile was low and predatory, with fins that stuck out and up at the back like the crest of some aggressive bird. It had clearly been almost destroyed and then put back together again: the hull was a patchwork of differently colored materials, most much newer than the carbon-scored base. Slung underneath the body was a turret – laser, Leia thought, and definitely not part of the original.

Her father grinned at her as he rapped his gloved fist against the hull. “Don’t knock her till you get to know her. She might need a paint job, but she flies like a dream.”

Anakin’s dubious taste in ships was legend. But so was his skill at flying them, and she had to admit, this one looked agile. Not at all a bad thing, if they were going to chase down a smuggler.

She was distracted from answering by a change in the feel of the Force around them. Moments later, the source of the change came pelting through the trees, wild hair flying. “Leia! I thought that was you.” Sisi Skywalker threw her arms around Leia, a bundle of tangible excitement and energy. Leia hugged her back, laughing and exclaiming at how tall she was getting.

It was impossible to talk about the trip ahead after that. By silent agreement, Leia and Anakin chose not to mention it to Sisi just now. It was easy to join into Sisi’s eager chatter instead.

In many ways, Sisi was all Anakin’s daughter, sandy-haired, growing tall, and always making some kind of trouble. But she had Padmé’s way of welcoming you into conversation, making you feel she was listening to you with interest. The force of her regard when she really was interested could throw you for a loop, if you weren’t prepared for it, because she was as strong as Luke or Anakin in the Force and projecting all over the place.

“You need to work on your shields, little one,” Leia said eventually, wincing a little as a wave of mixed amusement and embarrassment rolled in under one of Sisi’s stories. They had all settled in around the terrace table by then.

“I know,” Sisi sighed, just short of rolling her eyes. She sat up straighter, tucking a foot under one knee. “I’m good when I’m with other people, I swear. It’s just sometimes when I’m home I want to just…” She swept her hands out. “You know?”

“Not really,” Leia admitted. “Back at the Temple, once you learn shielding, you keep shielding. There’s too many Jedi around for anything else to make sense.”

Sisi squirmed. “You’re not at the Temple anymore, though.”

“That doesn’t mean I gave up on self-control,” Leia said.

“There’s nothing wrong with being open,” Sisi said. “I’m not accidentally influencing people or anything. I don’t think you have to hide your emotions to be a good person. Or hide from them.”

The way she looked at Anakin told Leia this discussion was rolling along well-worn tracks.

“Managing, Sisi,” he told her. “Not hiding.”

Sisi met his eyes, then sighed. Leia felt the tangle of Sisi’s feelings pull back, until they covered her like a second skin. Leia could still feel them if she reached out, but they didn’t make themselves known to her without her permission. “Thank you,” Leia said.

Now that Sisi had been distracted from catching Leia up on her life, she narrowed her eyes and looked Leia over. “You weren’t supposed to be back yet,” she said.

Force save her, she was sick of explaining this mess, and there was no way to do it without Sisi teasing her about it. “Secret mission,” she said.

The look Sisi leveled at Leia was frankly disbelieving. She turned to Anakin, who nodded somberly and repeated, “Secret mission.”

“You could just say you don’t want to tell me,” Sisi said. “Are you staying, at least?”

* * *

Anakin’s reaction to the whole thing was still bothering Leia as she tried to sleep that night.

She could wait. She got up to see if her father was still awake instead. The lounge was dark, but she saw a light under the door of his study, so she knocked.

Anakin let her in without surprise. “I was just starting to narrow down the list,” he said, clearing an open box of droid parts off a chair. A projected galaxy chart glowed above his desk. “There’s some things we can do with Taanab and what we know about the other one.”

“That’s…actually not what I came to talk about.” Leia leaned on the closed door, arms folded across her stomach. “When I brought up the other Leia, you seemed more than surprised. There was a second when I thought you were angry.” She frowned. “Or…something.”

Anakin was tense. He was trying to hide it, his fingers flicking through a menu on his datapad and closing it, but his face was too still. “How much did she say about me?”

“That’s the thing. She said almost nothing about you, except that she knew your name before she came back, but not Mom’s.” Leia mentally flicked through her memories of the recordings. Reluctantly, she added, “She did talk about Mom some. She was almost…reverent, about her.”

“She hated me,” Anakin said, and Leia met his eyes, shock lancing through her.

“What?” she said.

“The first time we met, when she heard my name, I felt it. Hatred, and anger, and fear, so strong you could sense it across a room. It made me distrust her. Obi-Wan had to talk me around to even keep me working with her.” Anakin swallowed. “It’s…bugged me, since then, because like I said, I was pretty sure by the end she was my daughter.”

“I thought she never knew you. She was adopted,” Leia said cautiously, not sure she wanted to know more about this. Something deep in her gut twisted at the thought of ever hating her father. It would be like hating a piece of herself; so much of who she was came from him. 

“She wasn’t really eager to explain,” Anakin said. “I didn’t get answers. What could I have been to her that made her react to me like that?” He seemed ready to go on, then cut himself off, jaw tight.

“Dad?” Leia said after a few seconds.

“I wasn’t in a good place when she was here,” Anakin said at last, his eyes on his fingers, restlessly twisting a bolt between them. “It was war. Things got darker by the day. Your mother told me she was pregnant. I was having dreams. Visions. Nightmares. I think if she had come any later, or if Padmé and Obi-Wan had trusted her less, or maybe I trusted them less, I would’ve stood by Palpatine. Even helping them, I had to let him…” He bowed his head. “I had to seem convinced by him.”

This was a part of the war her father never talked about. It was known, generally, that Anakin had let Palpatine groom him as an apprentice to learn more about him and the other Sith. To gain his trust, or at least his complacency. Leia had never asked how Anakin felt about that time; fear had always stopped her.

“I came so close,” he said, and Leia was shaken by the brittleness in his voice. Shaken worse by the idea that came next.

“You think that in her world…” Leia said, and the words choked off. She couldn’t even say it.

“I don’t know.” Anakin took a breath, and straightened, his shoulders falling back. He met her eyes squarely at last, his own determined. “It doesn’t matter, because it didn’t happen. I came back to all of you instead. And I’ve tried to make sure none of you would… would be in anything like the place I was.”

“We won’t. We aren’t,” Leia said. Her voice was steady now, her shields pulled firmly around her thoughts.

Anakin’s mouth quirked in a smile, but he just said, “Well, it’s late. You should get some sleep. I should have a starting place for you tomorrow.”

“All right,” Leia said, returning the smile.

But as she tried to fall asleep, she couldn’t shake the sick adrenaline of that conversation. Her father had never told her how close he had come to Falling. She was like her father in so many ways; the idea that he could, that he might, was too terrifying to accept. He had always seemed so strong and sure to her.

She had a good life. She had responsibilities. Why was she disrupting either to chase a scrap of someone else’s?

* * *

Leia looked up as the door opened. Anakin wrenched off the cloth he had wrapped around the lower half of his face and said, “This isn’t going to work. We need a different plan.”

He had not been happy that their first lead on Han Solo led them to Tatooine and had flatly refused to take Leia into some of the places he needed to go to find him. Leia had been holed up in their tiny rented room, instead. Leia did not love this plan, either. 

“Is he not here after all?” Leia asked. “I thought tonight was the meeting.”

Anakin leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “It was. The man doesn’t do live cargo.”

Leia winced at the phrasing, reassuring as it was to know that. “We’re not…”

“He meant passengers, too. I started offering higher prices, but some enterprising bush pilot overheard and started offering me a better deal. Took me another half an hour just to shake ‘em off.”

Leia set aside her datapad and turned to face him fully. “All right. Change of plans, then. I’ve been working on contingencies with all of this free time I’ve got.” She gave him a playful glare. 

“I’m listening.”

“If we aren’t having luck getting close to him in his usual places, we get him to take a cargo somewhere we know better,” Leia said. “Meet him there, take the cargo, offer him refreshments, go from there. It’s not what buying passage on the ship would be, but it at least gets us a more open-ended meeting.”

“That could work,” Anakin said cautiously. “He might know my face.”

“So we keep your face out of it,” Leia said. 

“Leia…” Leia’s skin prickled at the concern in his voice, but she met his eyes. “Are you sure you want to pursue this? It’s a lot of risk just for the possibility of an hour to get to know him. I don’t want you to pin your heart on that.”

“You know me better than that.” Leia shook her head. How to phrase the stubborn desire to keep going, that just a taste of knowledge wasn’t enough? “I’m not pinning my heart or my hopes on this. But I do want to know, and I’m not giving up that easy.”

“I don’t know if we can manufacture a fake cargo and set up a meeting before he leaves Tatooine,” Anakin said.

“You let me worry about that. Just try and find out where he might go next.” Leia smiled up at him. “Please?”

Anakin raised his eyebrow. “As if I’d let you keep going on your own.”

* * *

“You ask too much. Fifty credits more, that is the most I will pay.”

Han kept his sabacc face steady. “Seventy-five,” he countered. He wasn’t sure what species the potential client across the table was; it was hard to tell anything beneath head-to-toe black veils and a respirator that distorted their voice. Whoever they were, their Huttese could use some work and they were driving a terrible bargain.

He loved a sucker.

The client tapped their fingers on the table restlessly, then nodded. “Agreed.”

“Half up front,” he said warningly, raising a finger.

“Half when we load the cargo.”

They shook hands, and Han held on a moment too long, surprised. Under the leather gloves, the client’s fingers felt perfectly human. Small, with long fingers.

He watched them as they slid back into the crowd, keeping an eye on them as they returned to the dice games on the other side of the cantina. When they finally shrugged in resignation and said their goodbyes, Han gave them a head start, then followed them out.

He tailed them, padding from doorway to alley to covered walkway, keeping his distance. This rock was plenty lively at this hour, but most pedestrian traffic stuck to the tunnels and skywalks between the prefab buildings. His client had chosen the street instead. Only a magnetic field kept the air in; with the street lights dimmed for the night cycle, it looked like you could fall into the sky.

After ten minutes of this silent, stop-and-start chase, his quarry froze, then melted into the dark of an alley.

Han ran forward, blaster already in hand, but the alley was empty. He was ready to duck out the other end when a slight scuff made him turn and look up. A skywalk loomed over the alley. Crouched atop it, a flat black nothing against the shimmer of the stars, was the client. They seemed to stare at him for a moment, then took off in an improbably quiet sprint across the rooftops, like a shadow themselves.

Gauging their position and the direction the client was heading, Han took a calculated risk. Instead of following, he took the most direct route to the spaceport. He found a nice shadow to hide in and settled in to wait. No ship was allowed through the asteroid’s mag field; you had to go through an airlock to get in or out. Droid tugs pulled ships up to one of five docking ramps, or into the big hangar to load freight. All of these were in easy view of his spot.

He smiled smugly when he saw a black-veiled figure cross to the third ramp and speak into their hand. He had them. Slowly, he crept closer, trying to get a better angle as a ship trundled in to meet them.

Sharp. The shape of those fins was familiar. Han scrolled through a mental catalog, and then the shape resolved into a familiar one. A HWK-290: pricey when new. Even used, there couldn’t be too many of those around here.

* * *

The next morning, Leia stepped off the docking ramp and found Han Solo waiting there.

“Morning,” he said, looking her over a little too slowly for her liking. “Where’s your friend?”

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Robes. Breathing mask. About your height.” He held a hand out just over her head, as if measuring her height.

She swatted it away. “Tel’garah is sleeping,” she said smoothly. “And I know she didn’t tell you to meet at this ship.”

“Thought I’d take the initiative.”

Leia didn’t trust Han’s smile for a minute. Not only did it not reach his eyes, it barely reached his cheeks. Also, she had not planned to meet him here; she would have to keep him here and her father on the ship, or their whole plan would blow up in their faces.

“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll get the cargo.” She slapped the airlock shut before he could follow and climbed the steps to the docking ramp. When she slid to the floor of the ship, Anakin popped his head out from the cockpit.

“Back so soon?”

“Slight change of plans. Either he followed me, or he asked the right person.” Leia leaned down and pressed the switches on three hovercrates and slid them out from their slots under the bunks. She guided them up and through the ramp, and found Han Solo waiting with his arms crossed.

“Calm down, flyboy. I’ve got your credits,” Leia said.

“Ship’s this way,” Han said, pointing a thumb over one shoulder.

He led her to the main hangar, and they waited in uncomfortable silence as the outer door engaged and the airlock hissed and groaned. Leia was about to break it, when the inner door snapped open, and sound flooded in.

Her nerves were instantly ablaze at the sharp booms and whine of blaster fire, overlaid by gurgling roars. Han leapt through the door, blaster already up and firing; ahead, a man shouted and went down. In the next moment, streaks of red painted the air between them and the fight. They were in it now.

Leia heaved the hovercrates around and ducked behind them for cover, pulling Han with her. In the shadow of a beat-up Corellian freighter, thirty or forty meters away, stood a Wookiee. He took a blaster bolt to the shoulder and seemed to shrug it off, raising his fists in rage. One person lay on the ground; eight more kept their distance, several trading fire with Han while the others concentrated on the unarmed Wookiee.

As she watched, a man with shaggy blonde hair gave a signal, and two men leapt forward, swinging up electrostaffs that sparked and snarled as they activated. The other six fell back, breaking into two groups and finding better cover.

Instead of being cowed, the Wookiee growled and ran forward, grabbing up the limp body and throwing it at one of the staff-wielders. He went down under his comrade with a heavy clatter, but the other kept his distance, circling. Studying his movements, Leia could see a grace and confidence that promised he was well-practiced in the use of polearms. She wasn’t sure brute force would stop him.

Taking a breath, Leia reached inside her jacket and pulled out her lightsaber. She ignited it, still in the cover of the crates, and Han spared her a wide-eyed look. She backed up slowly, crouched low to the ground, then took a running leap. The hovercrates skidded forward under her, an ungainly beast with her as its rider. Her lightsaber was a blue blur as she deflected bolt after bolt. The fire began to focus on her. Good. Let them think the Jedi was the real threat.

She felt rather than saw Han break cover, sliding around the edge of the fight, behind the Wookiee’s grim dance with the staff-wielder. A streak of red ricocheted and glanced off a Rodian woman’s shoulder. Leia ignored the acrid smell of her burnt armor and jumped off her crates in a high arc that ended between the closest group of blasters and the Wookiee. She advanced on them, swatting aside bolts impatiently. “Why don’t you lay down your weapons,” she said. “You can’t win.”

She spun as a marksman on the other side of the fight took aim, catching his bolt just in time and directing it back at him. Behind her, someone moved; she felt a vibroblade slicing through the air. She drove her saber back between her arm and her side, straight through her opponent’s middle. She caught the woman on her shoulder and bulled into the others, using her as a shield until she could swing her lightsaber free. Behind her, there was a shout, followed by a ferocious crackle.

Leia whirled around, and her heart clenched. Han Solo lay on the floor, his blaster falling out of his open hand. The man with the staff was swinging it around a second time, and it connected with the Wookiee. The Wookiee jerked and stumbled, moaning.

“Move!” the leader, alone now, called from across the room. The two remaining with her tried to break away, and she stretched out a hand. The crate they had been hiding behind launched forward and caught them with enough force to shove them back, but they slithered away before it could pin them.

The man with the staff was wrestling the Wookiee into binders, and Leia sprang towards him. “No!” she cried. Those left standing were helping their injured companions towards the freighter. Two threw down covering fire, and Leia had to choose between speed and stopping their bolts from hitting her.

Their blasters weren’t set to stun.

She gave chase anyway. When she couldn’t get her blade up in time, she had to duck and roll. As she surged back to her feet, they rushed up the ramp of a waiting ship. She fell to one knee as it passed through the magnetic field on the other end of the hangar, panting. Behind her, she heard a grunt.

She turned, ready to defend herself again, but it wasn’t one of her fallen opponents. It was Han, pulling himself to his feet with a grimace. “Chewie?” he said.

“They just took off,” she said. She stood slowly as well. With a final hum, she deactivated her lightsaber.

“My ship,” Han said, eyes alight with urgency. She followed his gaze to the Corellian freighter, and without another word, they turned and ran for it.

Han half-stumbled down the corridor inside, yelling directions to the gun turret over his shoulder. Leia pulled out her comm as she ran. “Dad, I need you in the air. We’re chasing a big ugly freighter, and they’ve got Solo’s friend on board.”

“This was supposed to be the easy part,” Anakin teased, but she knew he'd be there. Leia clutched the wall as the ship jerked into the air. She threw herself into the gunner’s chair and hooked the headset over her ears, ignoring the ground falling away beneath them. The turret turned smoothly at her command, and she took a deep breath as she got the other ship in her sights.

This wasn’t her kind of fight, but she wasn’t Anakin Skywalker’s daughter for nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter One was posted off-cycle, but starting with this chapter, I am going to be posting new chapters on Tuesdays! We're really in it now, and starting next week, we'll be seeing a lot more of Han. Thanks again to Stars for beta'ing and discussing this story ad nauseam.


	3. Strange Days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Chewie taken, Han and Leia give chase. Days in hyperspace together are not quite the meeting Leia bargained for.

Han slapped at the comm just to stop it blinking. “What?” 

A man’s voice came through, all confidence. “I’m coming up on your tail. Don’t shoot.” 

“Who the hell are you?” Han tipped the Falcon into a sideways dive to avoid an arc of laser fire. He needed someone targeting that turret yesterday, and he said as much into his headset. The hunters’ ship was heavily armored; Han’s was not. 

“I’m the HWK-290 on your wing. I need you to get me an opening.” 

“The hell I will,” Han growled, seeing the now-familiar sharp outline draw even with him. “My copilot’s on that ship.” 

“Calm down, I’m not gonna shoot her down, just need enough distraction that they won’t notice a little surprise latching onto their hull. Heads up!” In tandem, the two ships broke apart, letting green streak harmlessly between them. Fire from the Falcon followed, drawing a line up the hull and into the air. Missed the turret. Han cursed. 

“Fine,” he said, flicking switches. “I’m going in closer.” The Falcon put on a burst of speed, soaring over and past the fleeing ship. Laser fire slammed into the hull, then again as the turret swung back around. Han wrestled his ship back onto her trajectory, not needing to look at the readouts to know the deflector shields wouldn’t hold long. “I know, I know,” he told her, and flipped her so he faced the other ship nose to nose. With a straight shot and an instant before the other gunner could react, the Jedi concentrated her fire on the turret and blew it away. Han whooped. 

The HWK-290 had rolled to avoid their quarry’s lasers, but with the turret gone, it pulled up. Han spotted something small and dark eject from the belly of the ship. Han reversed his engines, slamming the Falcon forward towards the other ship, and the pilot panicked and jerked the ship’s nose up. The two ships spun away from the asteroid together, the Falcon sticking too close for the other ship to make a jump. 

“You can let them go. I placed a tracker.” 

Han considered his options. He could keep toying with the other ship, but the most he could do was delay their jump. If they thought they had made a narrow but safe escape, they might not think to check for an unexpected passenger. He broke away from the other ship and fell back to the HWK-290's position. “Make the pursuit look good,” he said. 

Together, they tailed the other ship. Laser fire from the HWK-290 briefly caught the ship’s hull, then streaked over it. The Falcon fired as well, missing the ship ahead. After a minute or two, the ship pulled ahead, then disappeared into hyperspace. 

“This better work,” Han said to the other pilot. 

His Jedi passenger joined him in the cockpit after a minute, settling into the copilot’s chair. He looked sidelong at her. He didn’t want to get mixed up in any business involving mystics with laser swords. That got complicated quick. Then again, she and her friend had helped. 

“You got a name?” he asked her. 

She gave him a startled look, then smiled. “Leia.” She leaned across, holding out a hand. Warily, he shook it. Her hand was warm, small in his, with long, graceful fingers. He narrowed his eyes, his old suspicion coming back to him. 

“Not Tel’garah?” he said. 

She laughed sharply. “No,” she said, the laugh still in her voice. “But it’s a good name isn’t it?” 

“I’m grateful and all that,” Han said, “but I’m not interested in doing business with the Jedi.” 

The smile fell off Leia’s face, and for a moment, he swore he saw fire deep in those brown eyes. It intrigued him. “I’m not a Jedi,” she said. His eyes fell to the lightsaber now clipped to her belt, and she rolled her eyes. “I’m not, and this isn’t Jedi business either,” she said. “I suppose I’d better tell you there’s nothing in those crates worth the money we gave you, either.” 

“Good, because those are staying back on the asteroid,” Han said, but he was confused. Why the charade? What did they want if not less-than-legal transport for their goods? 

“Let’s start over,” Leia said. She turned towards him in the copilot’s chair. “I’m Leia Skywalker. It’s nice to meet you.” 

Skywalker. “Oh, no,” he said, raising his hands. A Jedi was one thing, but a Skywalker? “Absolutely not. Don’t tell me, that’s General Skywalker back on the other ship.” 

“Yes,” Leia said, and Han froze. He had been _joking_. “And he just placed a tracker on the ship that has your friend, so you might as well stick with us.” 

“And why does he have that tracker?” Han asked. “You went to a lot of trouble to get me taking a phony cargo. I got a bounty on my head. How do I know you’re not just taking me in?” 

“Maybe I just wanted to meet the man who made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs,” Leia said. 

“It was twelve,” Han said, indignant. “Less than twelve.” Leia smiled, and Han had the distinct feeling he’d been played for that response. He didn’t like it. “You listen here, sister…” 

General Skywalker’s voice broke in over comms. “I’m sending you coordinates for a rendezvous.” Han glanced sideways at the screen, his jaw set. All his instincts screamed against it. He put the coordinates into the navicomputer. 

If nothing else, he could get the girl off his ship.

The jungle they landed in was noisy with insect life, their chirps and croaks and buzzing filling the air. Han swatted at one with irritation as they crossed the clearing to meet Anakin Skywalker. The man stood with his hands resting casually in his pockets, looking for all the world like a man who’d spent his life flying freight, not wrestling with the fate of the galaxy. Too clean-cut to be a smuggler, but more familiar than he was comfortable with. 

He stuck out a hand when Han reached him, though he didn’t quite smile. “Anakin,” he said. 

“I know,” Han said, shaking his hand. (That grip could be bruising, if the General wanted: that hand was certainly metal. The General clearly didn’t want). “Han Solo.” 

Anakin’s gaze slid past Han to Leia, and he did smile, then. “That was unexpected,” he said. 

“You’re telling me,” Leia said. 

“Tracker’s working.” Anakin included them both in this comment. “Last I checked, they were still in hyperspace. When we’re sure they’re stopped somewhere, we’ll follow.” 

“‘We?’” 

“I don’t know about ‘we’—” 

Han and Leia stopped, eyeing each other sideways. Leia was the first to continue. “Dad, you don’t need to do this. I only brought you with me because I thought there wouldn’t be danger.” 

“The fact that there is danger means I should be with you more than ever,” Anakin said hotly. 

“No,” Leia said. “Sisi. Mom. You gave up this life, remember?” 

“So did you,” Anakin shot back. Leia took a deep breath, obviously prepared to keep arguing. 

Surprising himself, Han broke in. “She handled herself pretty good in that firefight,” he said reluctantly. They both turned to stare at him, and he shrugged. “Seems to me she’s old enough and strong enough to be getting into her own fights. Not that this _is_ her fight.” 

“Someone’s in danger and I can help stop it,” Leia said, though Han was startled to realize she was flushing. “I’m making it my fight.” 

“I’m not leaving you to go into this alone,” Anakin said. 

“I won’t be alone.” Leia took a breath. “Look, Dad, let’s have the rest of this conversation in private.” She took Anakin’s arm and steered him into his ship, not looking at Han. 

“I guess I’ll twiddle my thumbs, then,” he grumbled to himself. He was pacing the clearing when Leia came out some minutes later, this time alone. He looked up, and their eyes met and held. 

She held up a small black box. “I’ve got the tracker,” she said, starting across the clearing towards him. She stopped, close enough that she had to tilt her head up to meet his eyes. “You don’t have to take me with you. But I would like to help, if you’ll let me.” She pushed the black box into his hands. He frowned down at her. 

She was infuriating, and kind of a mystery, which always meant trouble. He didn’t know what kind of strings came with her help. Then he thought of Chewie out there, and how readily they’d fallen into working together in that fight. Didn’t he owe it to the old furball to take whatever help he could get?

“Fine. You can come with,” he said. The glint in her eye told him she knew he wasn’t as reluctant as his words. “Just don’t slow me down.” 

“Oh, _I_ won’t be the one slowing us down,” she said, pulling away with a sour look. He watched her go, throwing up his hands. They had been having fun. Hadn’t they been having fun? She disappeared into her father’s ship again, and Han shrugged and went into the Falcon. 

He left the ramp down, though. When a soft step sounded at the cockpit entrance, he didn’t examine the leap in his chest. “Where do I put my things?” she asked. 

He hauled himself out of his chair. “I’ll show you.” 

* * *

The trip through hyperspace caged them together for two days. Every strange sound had Han on high alert at first.

He overheard snatches of conversation as he wandered the Falcon. He paused, out of sight, at the edge of the communal area.

“Yes,” Leia was saying to someone on a holoprojector. “End of the week. I’ll check in before then, I promise.” He frowned, straining to hear more, but the call ended there.

Han kept moving, and Leia caught his sleeve as he passed her. “Come look at this,” she said. She had settled in at the table with the tracker and a datapad. A readout on the tracker, previously flicking through nonsense numbers, had settled onto stable coordinates. She shoved the datapad at him. “They’ve been here for about an hour. It could be refueling, but…” 

Han looked at the screen. “Magorre. Never heard of it,” he said. 

“It’s in the Alui sector. Not so far from home. The best way is to take the Triellus Trade Route.” 

Han grunted. “I know it,” he said. Not his favorite, too many pirates, but a small ship like his might be left in peace. 

“I don’t like it,” Leia said. “Things are complicated with that sector. Enarc was a Trade Federation hub. You heard about the Invasion of Naboo?" At his nod, she said, "They launched the invasion fleet from Enarc. The Republic sent the Federation packing towards the end of the war, and the sector rejoined the Republic with the Treaty, but…” 

“Republic in name only?” Han asked. 

“I don’t know,” Leia said. “Enarc is as loyal as favorable trade agreements can make it. Other systems in the sector? It’s hard to know without further intel, and I don’t have much of anything on Magorre. It’s too small, too unknown.” 

“This isn’t exactly a Republic mercy mission,” Han said. “We’ll be fine. Fly casual, stay under the radar, get in, get Chewie out. Easy.” 

“Right. Easy,” Leia said, laughter in her voice. 

“This says they’re mostly mineral mining,” Han said after a few moments, finally skimming through what the datapad had to say. 

“Does that mean something to you?” Leia asked. 

Han shrugged. “Good place for smugglers, but I don’t know why bounty hunters would take marks there.” 

“Does Chewie have a bounty?” 

“Nah, I take all the heat for our, uh, freight enterprise. But he’s bound to have some enemies. He was something big in that war of yours,” Han said. 

“War of mine?” 

Han waved a hand. “The Clone Wars. He fought with Jedi on Kashyyyk. Got captured, war ended, got bounced around, till finally I got him out of some damn Separatist hidey-hole on Onderon.” No need to mention why he’d been there; it had been humiliating enough in the moment. “Been together ever since. So yeah, no bounty, but probably some people who wouldn’t mind getting their hands on him.” 

Another time, a strange hum brought him to the cargo hold, and he recognized it too late as a lightsaber. He stood, mesmerized, as Leia moved through a one-woman duel, as slow and graceful as a dance. Her eyes were closed the entire time.

Leia stopped with her back to him, then the lightsaber went out with a hiss. 

“It wasn’t my war, you know,” she said, her voice pitched to carry across the hold. 

Han looked around, as if there was someone else she could be addressing, then said cautiously, “Yeah?”

“The Clone War,” Leia said. “I was a child when it ended. I’ve spent my life fighting for this peace, trying to knit things back together. Make a better Republic.” 

Far as he was concerned, ‘good’ and ‘Republic’ didn’t belong in the same dictionary together. “Good luck, out here,” Han scoffed. 

“Don’t you care about anything?” Leia snapped, turning to him at last. 

“I care about mine,” Han said. He crossed his arms. “The galaxy can get on fine without me.” 

“Of all the—” 

Han cut her off. “All right, so what's the high and mighty Leia Skywalker doing to save the galaxy? So you’re not a Jedi. What are you?” 

“I'm one of Senator Farsel's top aides!” she snarled. 

He let the silence drag out, then drawled, “Sounds important.” 

Leia’s chest heaved, and suddenly the tension in the air wound so tight Han felt his ears pop. He could have struck sparks off that silence.

“The Jedi have a set of sayings,” Leia said, her voice low. “Something they’re supposed to live by. _There is no emotion, there is peace; there is no ignorance, there is knowledge; there is no passion, there is serenity…_ ” 

Han raised an eyebrow. “I haven't known you long, but I’d say you’re a pretty passionate lady.” 

Her lips quirked at that, and suddenly Han could breathe again. “I’ll do more good as a politician than a Jedi Knight,” she said. With that pronouncement, she hooked her lightsaber onto her belt and disappeared along the hallway towards their quarters. 

Han had time to wonder about that, though he didn’t come close to any answers. The route they had to take through hyperspace was a long one, not so much because of distance as the need to keep a wary eye out. He was blinking hard over the controls when he felt a hand on his shoulder and started. 

“You need a relief pilot,” Leia said softly. “I can take over for a while.” Han’s protest died in his throat. It felt like a peace offering, and she was right. Chewie wasn’t here to spell him. Pain tugged at him at the thought. He had gotten so used to Chewie being here, even his temporary absence threw everything off. And it _was_ going to be temporary. 

“There better not be a scratch on her when I get back,” Han said. There wasn’t enough space in the cockpit, once he was standing; Leia was close enough he could feel the warmth of her body. He put a hand on her shoulder, and she backed up instinctively, banging her hip into the copilot’s chair. Leia’s whole body was tense – resisting moving away or moving closer, Han didn’t know. 

“Don’t get all worked up,” he said, sliding past her. He smiled to himself as he went. 

Didn’t matter why he was smiling. He just was. 

* * *

Magorre looked grim from space. It was a small planet, mottled in drab shades of grey and purple, surrounded by a diffuse system of rings that were visible more on the sensors than through the viewscreen until they got closer. Leia clutched the arm of her chair as the third large chunk of rock in a minute glided past them, half the size of the Falcon and near enough to reach out and touch. “Are we going _into_ the rings?” she asked. 

“Trust me,” Han said. “Debris fields like this are a smuggler’s dream.” He reached up, hitting a few buttons above his head. “Scramble your readings good enough, and the authorities think you’re just another rock.” 

“So do the other rocks,” Leia said. 

“Just watch.” 

It was a silent, tense journey. Han used the engines only to adjust slightly, seemingly feeling his way along a clear path through the rocks, which grew larger and larger as they approached the planet’s surface. When they broke free of the inner ring, Leia let out a long breath of relief. 

“All right,” she admitted. “That was...” 

Han gave her a sly smile, and she balked at the challenge there. _Go on, praise me,_ it said, and everything in her wanted to disappoint it just on principle. What was it about this man? There were echoes of other cocky men in her life, but never had she wanted so strongly to take someone down a peg without actually disliking them. 

Which gave her pause. When had she stopped disliking Han Solo? She remembered again the look in the other Leia’s eyes, and shivered. Suddenly, in the cramped space of this cockpit, the idea wasn’t so abstract. 

“That could have been worse,” was what she said. 

The only city with a spaceport lay on Magorre’s night side at present, glimmering faintly along the lip of a canyon. There were so many crags and crannies that Han had no trouble finding a hidden place to set down. The walk was another story. 

“I’ve got extra cold weather gear,” Han said, rummaging through compartments in the main corridor. “We’re going to need it out there.” He was right; when they ventured out, they were met by a blast of wind so cutting, Leia wished they had goggles as well. She squinted into it, then turned to find a good star to follow towards the canyon city’s position. 

“We’d better get moving,” she said grimly. 

Her mind churned, trying to lay out plans even with so little information to go on. Bounties meant money; in a place like this, she guessed the people who had it would be few. Her hand drifted to her lightsaber once. It rested at her hip, as it hadn’t in years. She hoped they could negotiate on terms that didn’t involve the tip of a weapon, but she would rather be ready to fight than dead. 

After a time, she forced herself to take careful breaths and center herself, letting her consciousness spool out in the Force. Worrying helped nothing; true readiness came from being aware of the moment. A whisper of a memory of Master Billaba followed the thought. That steadied her, as well. 

They stole into the city like thieves, creeping through alleys and side streets. They had been hoping to watch the locals to see what would blend in, but there was no one: the streets were unnaturally silent and empty. They had just reached the main road when, all at once, every single light went out. 

“What…” Leia started, before Han’s hand covered her mouth. He drew her back against the building on the corner, tense and watchful. 

They both jumped when another voice hissed, “ _Hey!_ ” 

Partway down the alleyway they had come down, a door was cracked open, and an older human male peeked out. His eyes darted left and right, and he beckoned them towards him with jerky movements. “It’s past curfew,” he told them, pulling and chivvying them inside as soon as they were close enough. “What are you thinking, couple o’ greenies who think it’ll be fun to test the governor’s patience?” 

They had ended up in a small, dingy kitchen. The man jabbed a finger towards a bare patch of floor without even offering his name. “You can sleep there,” he said. “Not that long until morning shift anyway. I swear, they come in more clueless every day.” 

And then he just left them there. Han and Leia looked at each other, then Han shrugged. “At least we’re off the street. Things are stricter here than I reckoned for; we might have to be on our toes tomorrow.”

Leia looked down at the floor with distaste. Han was already stripping off his bulky top layer; it was warm enough in here that the winter gear was getting uncomfortable fast. He folded and bunched it up against one of the cabinets, then sank down into a sitting position with a sigh. He leaned his head back against the cabinet. “Best we’re gonna get,” he said. “Might as well get some sleep.” 

Instead of doing the same, Leia crouched over her pack as she worked with her datapad, trying to figure out how to get into the system’s local network. After a time, she heard Han say her name, and looked up. 

He had tilted his head up to look at her through the dim light. “C’mere,” he said.

She stiffened. “What?” 

“We’re on a strange planet, you took the last watch on the Falcon, who knows how long this governor gives people to sleep before morning shift,” Han said. His voice was a low rumble, like a summer thunderstorm rolling in over the lake. “And it’s cold. Come here. I’ll keep watch.” 

Leia hesitated, but weariness dragged at her bones. Things had been so strange since she and Han had set off after Chewie, or maybe even since she had received those recordings; what was one more strangeness piled on top of it all? Without a word, she laid her overcoat on the ground beside Han. He shifted one arm as she settled in, and somehow she ended up tucked against his side, his arm heavy and radiating heat across her shoulders. 

She closed her eyes, mumbling, “If this is a come-on…” 

His arm jerked behind her, and she reached up, holding it in place. Turning into the warmth of his body would have to be apology enough. She was too tired, too confused, to make a real one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to Stars for the beta.
> 
> Also, someone asked about timelines in the comments last chapter! If it would help to see it written out, [I made a tumblr post.](https://minnarr.tumblr.com/post/190132159060/its-not-fire-you-want-to-ignite-timeline)


	4. Mine Entrance Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The search for Chewie leads Han and Leia into Magorre's mining facility.

Leia woke to a crick in her neck, a deep snore she could feel under her cheek, and a reluctance to move. Caught in that sleepy half-awareness, she had just enough time to think that this was nice before the next snore cut off. The body beside hers jerked, and reality hit her like a splash of cold water. She sat up, pushing her hair out of her face, and wondered what the hell she had been thinking last night.

Pale light filtered in through the kitchen windows; that must have been what woke her. Surely, morning shift started soon. She stood and started gearing up for the day, dragging on the heavy outerwear and buckling her utility belt on top.

What was she doing cuddling up to some Outer Rim smuggler, just because he was there? Just because in a life she had never experienced, they had been close? They had known each other all of two days. Two days was too short a time to get involved in anything, even for a roguish smile. Or the knowing way his eyes followed her. Or the soft burr of concern in his voice last night.

There was a rustle behind her, and Han yawned. “Morning,” he said, as if nothing had happened last night. Something uncurled inside Leia.

And that was when the Force told her something was amiss, just before the outer door whooshed open. A trio of sentients in tailored grey uniforms blocked the exit. She heard Han jump to his feet, and she grabbed up her bag and ran to the inner door. She slapped her hand down on the control. Two red lights blinked on, and the door made an electronic noise of denial.

She turned, holding up her empty hands. “Good morning, gentlemen. What seems to be the problem?” Nearly at her side in this small space, Han stood with blaster drawn and aimed.

“I’m going to need your personnel numbers,” the grizzled human man leading the squad said, drawing his own sidearm slowly. Behind him, the others followed suit.

“You don’t need our personnel numbers,” Leia said, reaching out to brush against the man’s mind. It clenched tight as a fist, and Leia gritted her teeth. She had never been the best at this little trick, and by now she was years out of practice. Words would have to do. “We’re just visitors. Got a little lost from our ship.”

“They’re not in the registry,” a green-skinned Twi’lek commented from behind the leader’s shoulder. He tilted his datapad towards his commander.

“Nice try,” the man said, barely glancing at it. “Cuff ‘em till we sort out where they belong.”

Han shot before she could catch his eye, and the Twi’lek fell to the ground, stunned. As the other two raised their weapons, Leia threw out a hand. They stumbled and fell back like leaves hit by a sudden breeze. A blaster shot went wide.

“Quick,” Leia said, and she and Han rushed the off-balance guards together, pushing through to the street outside. Leia was already looking for the best place to get up to a roof, into an alley, anything to avoid a straight chase. She skidded to a stop, grit crunching under her feet, as she realized Han wasn’t with her.

He had just ducked behind three parked speeder bikes. As the two remaining guards spilled into the street after them, he rose up to aim a shot at them. They broke apart, and it passed harmless through air. He gestured furiously at Leia.

“What are you doing?” she hissed as she fell into a crouch beside him. He pressed his blaster into her hand and nodded at the guards.

“Cover me,” he said.

“It’ll take too much time to—” Leia broke off as a shot ricocheted off one of the bikes with a shower of sparks. She hissed out a breath and leaned up to return fire at the advancing guards. She was aware of Han’s hands working furiously beside her as she aimed shots at the guards’ feet, making it impossible to advance. One bolt passed so close to her that her hair sizzled, and she spared a thought for her lightsaber, still at her hip.

With a growl, one of the speeder bikes started, and Han let out a victorious shout. “C’mon,” he said. He got on the bike and hauled her up after him, then gunned the engine. Leia looked back and saw, as if in slow motion, the guards breaking for the two remaining bikes to pursue. She saw the fuel tanks, felt the blaster in her hand, knew just the right angle to aim.

Two shots, and the speeder bikes went up in angry red flame. The guards fell back, shielding their faces. She wrapped both arms around Han’s waist, and she felt his chest shake with exultant laughter. She laughed, too.

She didn’t miss violence, or pain, or bearing witness to suffering. She had seen too much of all three in the three short years she had spent as Master Billaba’s apprentice. But sometimes, she did miss the rush of action, the pure certainty of trying to survive and get as many people out as possible.

Han seemed to be just trying to weave a confusing path and get away, but Leia began to look for where to head next. They stayed to back alleys, but when she caught sight of main streets, they were no longer silent and empty. People filled them, all heading in the same direction.

“We need to follow them,” she said.

“What?” Han called back to her.

“The people. We need to follow them.” She was even more sure the second time she said it, feeling the subtle buzz of the Force rising with her words.

“Skywalkers and their hare-brained ideas,” Han said, but he began to weave a way through the silent maintenance alleys, always in the direction the throng of people flowed. The city came to an abrupt end, contained wholly in its planned grid. They stopped in the shadow of a refuse collector and Leia watched the crowd break into separate strands. The queues proceeded past grey-uniformed officials to a series of large metal lifts on the canyon’s edge.

“Morning shift,” she said. “The guards are a complication.”

“So we don’t go through the front door,” Han said, as if the answer was obvious. He was a smuggler, Leia thought; maybe it was to him.

They ghosted through the city, no longer following the people but following the canyon. When they were far enough from witnesses, Han nosed the speeder out from the buildings and to the canyon’s edge. It was not a sheer drop, but it was close enough that Leia hissed a warning and tightened her arms around Han’s waist.

“Easy,” he murmured, and turned so the entire right side of the speeder hovered at the very precipice. And then, he nudged the nose over the edge and put gentle pressure on the accelerator.

The repulsors whined, and the speeder tilted sickeningly. Leia squeezed her eyes shut, reaching out for the Force, ready to lift them bodily back onto the canyon’s edge if she had to. But she didn’t feel the speeder overbalancing, ready to tumble. Instead, she felt their angle change slowly enough that the repulsors caught against the near-vertical grade of the rock, and pulled them against it.

What happened next was a fall controlled so finely that Leia was breathless, amazed that a man without Force sensitivity could manage it.

As they neared the bottom, Leia finally felt able to look around them. Rock veined with every shade of grey from pearlescent pale to nearly black rose around them. Below them was the river that had carved its way through the rock over eons, its water stained a purple so vibrant and opaque that the weak light of the sun reflected from it and cast the color for several meters up the canyon walls. Beside its winding course ran a rail line.

Leia laughed.

“Can you hold here?” she asked.

Han turned his head slightly towards her, then she heard the repulsors’ whine rise, then steady again, holding them shaking against a slight protrusion from the canyon face. “Yeah. Think I can do that. What are you thinking?”

“Do you trust me?” she asked.

She felt Han’s attention, in the shift of his shoulders and in the razor’s edge of his mind. The Force twined around them like a breeze. “What do you need me to do?”

“When I give the signal, cut the repulsors,” she said.

The low moan echoing towards them through the cut in the earth wasn’t the repulsors and it wasn’t the wind. It was a railjet, gaining speed as it came hurtling towards them. Leia heard it coming before Han did, but she felt the moment he understood her plan, her mind still open and attuned to every fluctuation in the living Force.

“Now!” she cried as it came around the bend, roaring with the fury of a thousand rapids. She felt the repulsors release their grip on the rock, and in that moment, she pushed with all her might against the canyon’s wall. The railjet was a black blur, a second river beneath them, as they fell towards it.

Han hit the repulsors at the same moment she pushed out a second time with the Force. For a few terrible seconds, they skidded down the length of the railjet, their combined effort not enough to match its speed. Then, with a jolt, they stopped. They flew off the speeder together, grasping and clinging to each other and the durasteel beneath them. Sparks flew as the speeder hit the top of the railjet behind them, then bounced off and was left behind like so much refuse.

They were safe.

* * *

There was a problem:

In her fumblings with the datapad last night, Leia had thought the system’s communications network merely confusing to access. Now, she stared at the screen with trepidation as she realized access was restricted and secured, far beyond her meager slicing abilities. She could neither seek information from the HoloNet nor send communications without drastic action.

There went any safety net.

She tucked the datapad into her bag and stepped up to join Han. The railjet had dropped them in what they were pretty sure by this point was a processing facility for the minerals the planet mined. Sneaking in had not been difficult, once they got onto ground level; there was no checkpoint on this end of the trip. They had slipped away from the workers and begun scouting. 

Now they stood on a catwalk overlooking a vast, warehouse-like space with a maze of conveyor belts and work stations. Everyone wore gloves, goggles, masks, and thick protective aprons. Something about the whole situation was bothering Leia, and she had hoped to find out just what they were processing here.

It came into the room in great troughs, crystals of a bright, bright purple poking out from the dull rock around. The work in here involved chemical baths and then extraction of the crystals from their matrix. Leia was glad for the masks they had swiped: even through the filter, the smell made her eyes water.

She certainly recognized the color of the things. It was the same color that stained the river that ran through the canyon, so vibrant as to look unnatural. Maybe that was all that was bothering her.

“We’re going to have to get onto one of their computers if we want any more information,” Leia told Han.

“No Wookiees up here,” Han said. “Hardly any non-humans.” 

Startled, Leia looked again and realized Han was right. That was what was wrong with this picture. More than that, the size of the above-ground operations they had seen accounted for most of the workers ferried in from the city. So then who worked the mines?

“I’ve got a nasty feeling I know where Chewie is,” Leia said. 

It took some time, but they found their way deeper into the facility, following the direction the crystals had come from, their instincts, and eventually signage. Durasteel corridors gave way to grey rock, and they began to hear the din of power tools at work.

Everything they had seen so far on Magorre had been meticulously organized. The mine, by comparison, was chaos. At the center of the carved-out cavern was a massive hole in the ground, with scaffolds and walkways spidering down until they disappeared into darkness. Sentients of all species moved into and out of tunnels that irregularly dotted the sides of the hole, though most seemed to be within the tunnels.

There were many fewer humans here, and most of them wore grey uniforms. Some were directing the activity down below. Three uniformed humans stood around the edge of the hole with deadly-looking blaster rifles in their hands, their eyes on those working below.

As they edged around the perimeter of the cavern, Leia could see a few Wookiees, standing head and shoulders above even the bulkiest of the other miners.

“Are any of those him?” Leia whispered.

“No.” Han looked grim. “It’s a damned can-cell nest down here.”

Leia smiled, recalling the large winged insects he meant. “So fly casual,” she teased.

He looked startled, for a moment, then like he didn’t know whether to be annoyed or amused. He settled on striding towards the hole, Leia a step behind. His confidence carried them onto the walkways, where he wrapped a hand around the forearm of one of the Wookiees. He murmured urgently to them as he tried to tow them towards one of the emptier tunnels. They stayed stubbornly in place, moaning a confused question, then suddenly started complying.

When they were safely out of sight of any uniforms, the Wookiee turned to Han and spoke rapidly, urgently, inclining their head close to Han’s. “You’re…” Han said, then, “Huh,” and listened attentively, looking less happy by the moment.

“What did you say?” Leia asked, when there was a break in the conversation.

“I tried to pull rank. Well, Chewie’s rank. But it turns out Wolanna here was a Kashyyykian colonel, too. She…” He broke off to listen as she placed a hand on his shoulder. “Damn.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his head. “Sounds like there’s a lot of Wookiees here, some of ‘em like Wolanna and Chewie. Whoever’s in charge pays bounty hunters to bring him old military officers.”

Leia frowned. “Why would he do that?”

Wolanna grumbled a phrase, and Han said, “Oh, great. Looks like I wasn’t too far off in my guess.” At Leia’s look, he added, “The guy in charge was some kinda officer in the Separatist army, lost a big battle on Kashyyyk. Gets his jollies enslaving Wookiees who fought there.”

“ _Enslaving_?” Leia said sharply, looking at Wolanna.

Slavery was illegal in the Republic, but it still persisted in places, particularly in the Outer Rim. This was nauseatingly close to home, just the next sector over. Her own employer worked closely with the Alui sector’s senator. Did they know this was happening? Or was this planet so small, so marginal beyond whatever profit it made, that no one looked closely at where they got labor?

Leia’s voice was hard when she said, “What’s the name of the man in charge?”

“Karstan Lero.”

“Lero. I won’t forget that name,” Leia snarled. “I’m taking this up with the senator when I get home. What about Chewie?”

Han turned to Wolanna, then flinched as she spoke. “We have to go. Wolanna, you’ve been a real help.” He clasped her forearm, an almost formal gesture of thanks, then turned away. She let out a mournful groan.

Leia tilted her head back and met her eyes. “This isn’t over,” she told Wolanna, and followed Han.

Han had abandoned all pretense of stealth, even his cool manner gone. Leia ran to catch up with him, hissing an inquiry, and he said, “They’re probably still processing their new...slave.” He bit out the word. “You know what that means?”

“Slave chip,” Leia said. The words hung between them in the silence that fell, and Leia didn’t protest their speed anymore. They hit the top of the mine at a run.

* * *

Karstan Lero leaned back in his chair with a satisfied sigh. “Colonel Chewbacca of Kashyyyk,” he said, letting his crisp Core World accent curl around the words. “I was so gratified to hear of your arrival on planet. I believe this is the second time I have had the pleasure.”

The Wookiee on the other side of the glass roared out an answer, struggling against the binders. Lero glanced down as the translator fed words onto a screen beside him.

Lero smirked. “Unsatisfied with your accommodations? I understand. You will be given something less...restricting as soon as I am assured that I can trust you to wander about. So many pesky medical checks to get through first. Is he ready?” he added, _sotto voce,_ to a medical droid stationed at a screen along one wall.

At that moment, the lights flickered once and a klaxon began to wail in the corridor. Lero snapped, “What’s happening?”

“Intruder alert,” the droid said, turning uneasily in place.

Lero pulled a comlink out of his pocket and rapped into it, “Report.”

“Intruders in mine entrance three,” came the reply. “Sending imagery to your screen now.”

The footage, blue-filtered, began to play on his screen. Lero watched in disbelief as two humans pelted out of the mine entrance. The man fired on the closest guard when his rifle was only half-raised, the shot hitting true. Others tried to fire on them, but the woman spun, something in her hand. A beam of light ignited, and she swept the shots aside until the pair made it out of the door.

“ _Jedi,_ ” Lero hissed, his eyes going wide. The imagery on his screen changed to a new holocam, and he recognized a corridor that might lead them here. Fear whispered inside him for the first time in years.

He fumbled for his comlink. “Send guards to corridor Four-Besh!”

They were already scrambling; his head of security was nothing if not efficient. Almost as soon as he spoke, guards rounded the corner to block the intruders’ way. The view became obscured by smoke as blasterfire missed its mark and hit a conduit. Lero watched, on the edge of his seat. Surely that many guards would stop them.

A lightsaber beam cleaved through the smoke, and then the woman emerged behind it, focused intensity in every line of her body. Fear became panic, and Lero leapt to his feet. There was still time to escape and regroup somewhere safer. He could lose many parts of this operation, but he refused to survive the Clone Wars only to lose his life to a Jedi in his own facility.

He ignored the medical droid’s inquiry and burst out into the hallway. He didn’t have a blaster, but he did have his comlink. He raised it to his mouth as he ran, rapping out orders to prepare his armored speeder. This corridor linked with... _Yes._ He made a hard left. If he could get to the end of this corridor, there was a lift straight to one of the speeder bays.

His chest was tight, his breath coming in harsh pants. Only a few...more...

He collapsed against the wall of the turbolift, struggling to get his breath back. His eyes were fixed on the floor numbers as they counted down. _Ground._ He let out a ragged sigh of relief, then straightened his shoulders, smoothed his thinning hair back, and stepped out into the speeder bay.

Lero was safely ensconced in plush seating, the grey rock of the surface blurring past the speeder’s windows, when his comlink buzzed in his pocket. He withdrew it. “Yes?”

“Sir, they escaped,” came the voice. “Along with a stolen slave.”

“The new one?” Lero said, already knowing the answer. He twisted around in his seat, trying to see behind him. Surely Jedi vengeance wouldn’t be following him. He scanned the horizon anyway, his heart in his throat. He couldn’t see anything, but he wouldn’t rest easy knowing they could still crawl out of some hole and come after him.

“Yes, sir.”

“ _Find them,_ ” Lero growled, and cut the call.

Magorre was his. He had thought it was far enough from the Core to escape Republic interference and their pesky regulations on sentient labor. Acquiring enough droids after the close of the Clone Wars to start a facility from new would have cost more than the entire planet was worth, so he had turned to the most cost-effective alternative. The Wookiee slaves had always been a risk, but Kashyyyk had cost him everything, once upon a time. The Jedi had helped, but he had never dared enact the same revenge on them.

He would not let them cripple this operation.

Lero put in a different comm code. “Traffic control,” he said. “This is Lero, code Krill-Leth-Seven-Seven-Zero-Five-Eight. If anyone tries to leave this planet, blow them out of the sky.”


	5. Run and Hide

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Han, Leia, and Chewie race to send out a message about the situation on Magorre. A chapter in which both shield deflectors and emotional deflection feature heavily.

“I know. I know, buddy.” Han submitted to Chewie’s embrace with only a little feigned reluctance, his face smashed into his friend’s fur. It was good to have him back on the Falcon. He didn’t know what they would have done if they had been even a little later. Even the thought made him sick.

He heard a footstep beside them, and then Chewie peeled one arm off of him and pulled Leia in for a hug as well, throwing his head back with a crow of joy. Han extracted himself soon after that, making a show of running a hand through his hair to fix it.

He busied himself powering the Falcon on, enough to get the scanner and comms working. He hooked his headset over one ear and set to work looking for a frequency he could listen in on. What he found made him scowl. “Traffic control’s on lockdown,” he yelled back towards the others.

Leia came into the cockpit just ahead of Chewie, though she let him take his seat. She leaned over Han’s shoulder instead. “That’s no good. There’s no way I’m getting a message out through their network.”

“What message? Calling for help?” Han hoped he sounded disdainful, rather than offended. “I’ll find us a way out of here, don’t you worry, princess.”

“This is about more than our skins. We have to get information about the operation here out.” Han turned to frown at Leia, and found her face much closer than he’d expected. While his brain stuttered, she glared at him. “The slaves? Forget about them?”

“No,” Han said, and it didn’t sound true. So what? He’d gotten Chewie out. That was all you could do. But before Leia could open her mouth to excoriate him ( _again_ ), he said quickly, “Okay, you wanna get information out past planetary restrictions? We’ll have to get out of atmo and lock a signal onto the nearest relay.”

“With traffic control shooting at us all the way,” Leia said.

“Yeah,” Han said. “You got a message ready?”

“Give me a few minutes.” Leia ducked back out of the cockpit. It felt like more than a few minutes; Han spent it tapping his fingers impatiently. When she returned, Leia handed Han a datatape. “That’s everything I’ve got. The destination’s coded in, all you have to do is get it to a relay.”

Han took it. “How are your mechanics?”

“Not great,” Leia admitted.

“Then I need you in a gun turret, Chewie up here to work on the signal and help me keep the Falcon in one piece, and I should be able to keep us up there long enough to get the message out.”

“Okay.”

Han watched Leia go, then glanced at Chewie. “Went without argument,” he explained. “It’s a nice change.” Chewie rumbled something teasing, and Han felt his face darken. “You didn’t have to share the ship with her.”

Chewie responded, and Han reached out and hit the ignition. “All right, just keep your mind on the battle, fuzzbrain.”

This was where he belonged. Hands on the steering yoke, danger in the offing, in control. “We got it all under control,” he muttered to himself, and shot the Falcon out of its hiding place, turning her nose sharply up towards Magorre’s lilac sky.

The ship was juddering in the outer layers of the atmosphere before traffic control scanned them. There was some sort of carrier ship out there, crouched in low orbit. Han answered control’s hail when it came, hoping to delay whatever was in that carrier. “This is cargo ship _Sparrowhawk_ , we cleared this days ago.”

There was only a moment’s pause. “We have no cargo ship _Sparrowhawk_ in our records,” the voice on the other end said. “Return to the spaceport for registration or be destroyed.”

“I’m telling you, the captain said we had this all cleared up with your boss. Can you get him on the line? Tell him it’s for Captain, uh, Sky...lo.” Dammit, he’d never been good at coming up with names. Or cover stories.

“Prepare to be des—” Han shut the call off and switched to ship comms. “Get ready for a fight,” he said.

“That was quick.” Leia’s voice was dry. “They didn’t take to your shining personality?”

“Humorless bastards,” Han said. He could see the starfighters that had come out of the carrier now, glinting as they caught the light. Half a dozen of the things. “Chewie, angle the front deflector shields and let me know when we’re far enough out.”

There was a silence, two or three or ten heartbeats long, as the starfighters crossed the black between them and Han waited for Chewie. He was about to give up and ask for an update when Chewie warbled an affirmative. “Free of the network restrictions. We’re going comms-dark in here, I’m going to need all the power for the signal. May the Force be with us,” Han said.

He reached up and toggled a few controls overhead, then pushed his headset off at the buzz of static. 

“Yeah,” he said softly to Chewie’s inquiry. “Nothing wrong with a little faith.” No need to go into just what – or rather, _who_ – he was placing faith in just now. He had the right people in the right places, and they’d pull through this fight.

Tension coiled in Han’s fingers where they grasped the yoke, and then the starfighters began to fire.

Han juked and dodged and rolled, trying to avoid hits rather than escape. Chewie’s job would be much harder if they tried to jump to hyperspace. To his wonder, he found that this time, Leia’s timing on the turret was much better. When Han sent the Falcon into a spin, there was a half-second when the turret lined up perfectly to take a shot at the lead starfighter. She took it without hesitation, and it exploded into a brilliant burst of yellow and white. It felt like he was leading a dance with a partner he could neither look at nor speak to, but she followed flawlessly all the same.

Soon, trying to hold position inside the planet’s rings began to take its toll on the Falcon’s defenses. He’d asked Chewie to place most of the shield power over the front, where the transponder was, but it meant the back was taking hits they couldn’t afford. Somewhere deeper in the ship, there was a muffled explosion, and the ship shuddered.

“What’s that?” Han asked, frantically turning the yoke to compensate for the unexpected thrust. Chewie growled, and Han snapped, “Well, redirect the power, then! No, you’re right, keep working on that signal. We’ll just have to...” Hope nothing vital leaked. Hope the electrical fire didn’t spread. They could assess later what they’d lost, but for now, they were still flying and the flagging shields were still in place. Red streaks attested that the turret was just fine.

“How much longer on that signal?” Han yelled as another starfighter broke up, close enough that a fragment barely missed the Falcon’s hull. He snarled in frustration at Chewie’s answer. “Back into the ring it is!”

This time when he aimed the Falcon’s nose into Magorre’s inner ring, he didn’t take it slow. He let his eyes and reflexes, moving faster than conscious thought, guide him through the debris field. One of the icons for pursuing ships blinked out behind him, then another. Just two on his tail, then. He could work with that.

At least Leia couldn’t yell at him about the risk.

He took the first opening he could, bursting past a large chunk of ice and rock and into clear space. He was just beginning to lead the two remaining fighters in a merry dance when a cluster of new readings registered on the scanner. “Hell. Looks like they’ve got reinforcements,” he said. “Chewie?”

The next group of starfighters was almost in range when Chewie’s voice rose in a triumphant howl. “Good job! Now divert all shield power to the rear deflectors.”

The Millennium Falcon shot upwards, breaking free of the starfighters’ trajectory just as they began to fire. One of the ships trailing him got unlucky, caught in friendly fire. That only confused them for a moment, though, and then they were on the Falcon’s tail, trying to maneuver to flank her. They were too spread out for Leia to push them all off with one turret. Han cursed and threw the Falcon into a series of dizzying dives and turns, but these pilots weren’t as clumsy as some he’d faced. They managed to avoid colliding into each other or the Falcon.

“I know the deflector shield’s failing!” he yelled at Chewie when he tried to inform him. “Do we have any power to spare? Auxiliary power from the hyperdrive? No, dammit, you’re right, okay.” He had three choices: try to shake them off in the ring, go to ground on the planet surface, or just book it and hope for the best.

The plan had been to hide on the surface, power down, and hope no one had tracked them. Han hated it, but it was the smart move, assuming someone would respond to their distress call. He was just turning to do that when his sensors screeched that something had just come out of hyperspace.

Several somethings, and the light that signaled an incoming hail started blinking.

Han answered flatly, “What?”

“Thought you could use some backup, Solo,” came the smug reply, and Han recognized that voice. Skywalker.

“That was fast,” he said.

“No time to chat,” Skywalker replied, and he and the other ships tore into the starfighters surrounding the Falcon before they had time to react. “Beaming you some hyperspace coordinates,” Skywalker said as the last starfighter exploded. “Follow us out.”

“You got that, Chewie?” Han asked.

In less than a minute, they were in hyperspace. Han laughed and reached up to restore ship comms to full power. “Hey, princess. Looks like your message was received loud and clear.”

“Don’t call me that,” Leia said, but her voice was warm, laughing. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

And then there she was in the doorway, hugging Chewie as he rocked her back and forth. She broke away from Chewie and turned to Han, and he was out of his seat and grabbing her into an embrace before he could think better of it. They ended up back in their seats, Han in the pilot’s, Chewie in the copilot’s, and Leia in the jump seat, out of breath but happy.

“That was a lucky save,” Han admitted.

“That was just my father when he’s worried,” Leia said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he called up some friends and just waited for a distress call.”

“I thought you talked him into trusting you with this?” Han said.

“I talked him into letting me go without him, but he wasn’t happy about it. Only he’s allowed to take foolish risks.” Leia smiled fondly, and for the first time Han could picture General Skywalker as a father, not a legend. Huh.

“So who are his buddies? More war heroes?”

“Oh, probably,” Leia said. “He’s got a lot of friends from those days. Catch a glimpse of any of the ships?”

“Looked like some old ARC-170s,” Han said. “Republic?”

“Or former Republic. Definitely old friends.” She was silent for a few long moments, and Han risked a glimpse back. She was smiling, relaxed. He had to admit: it was a nice sight.

* * *

“This doesn’t look like a spaceport,” Han muttered, eyeing the green landscape below. Anakin was leading them in; the starfighters had left them when they dropped out of hyperspace.

“No.” Leia smiled. “See that lake? With the islands?” He followed her pointing finger. “At the edge of it, on the near side, there’s a house.” It spread out low along the shore of the lake, its pale stone almost glowing in the sunlight. “That’s home.”

“Huh,” Han said. His face was unreadable.

Leia refused to feel awkward about this part. “It’s as good a place as any to figure out our next steps,” she said.

“‘Our’?”

“I’m not letting you go just yet, flyboy. You and Chewie are witnesses, and if you think I’m letting Lero stay in the shadows out there…”

Leia ignored both Han’s protests and whatever Chewie said that made Han fumble and huff. Instead, she went back to collect her things. When they landed, she was first off the boarding ramp.

Padmé waited at the edge of the garden, and Leia grinned to see her. Even at home, her mother dressed in a fine gown of lake-blue silk, her hair curled and pinned to frame her face. She held out her arms with an answering smile, and Leia stepped into them without a thought for the grime she was covered in. “Hey,” Leia said.

They broke apart, and Padmé’s eyes lifted to look over Leia’s shoulder. She turned slightly, and beckoned the other two forward. “Mom, these are Han Solo and Chewbacca. Han, Chewie, this is my mother, Padmé Amidala.”

Padmé included them in her warm smile easily, though the mischievous glance she darted at Leia suggested she knew just who Han Solo was and why he was here. Anakin joined them as they walked to the house, wrapping an arm around Leia’s shoulders to pull her in for a brief, tight hug.

“Thanks for the save,” she said.

“Yeah, this you running off into danger alone thing? I’m not a fan.”

“Have you ever listened to the stories about you?” Leia said.

Anakin groaned despairingly. “Why couldn’t you have been more like your mother?”

“Oh, she is,” Padmé called lightly over her shoulder.

Padmé was at her most ruthlessly hospitable, and with Threepio’s help, she got Han, Leia, and Chewie chivvied off in different directions to clean up. Leia emerged from the fresher feeling like a new person, her hair dried and braided back again, with clean clothes soft against her skin.

She wanted to linger in her room, but she knew delaying the inevitable questions and conversations would not help. Beyond that, she had work to do.

She meant to corner her mother first, but Han found her instead. He wrapped his hand around her elbow as soon as she reached the living areas, dragging her onto a terrace. “Han!” she hissed, startled more than angry.

Han put a finger in her face. “This thing about me sticking around. I got work to do, Leia. I’m not getting mixed up in some Republic politics mess.”

Leia’s temper rose, and she pushed Han’s hand away. “So you feel good about leaving those slaves there to rot, do you?”

“And another thing,” Han said, not even stopping to listen. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten about the fake cargo. I knew something was fishy from the start, but I want some answers here. Why the hell did you come after me?”

Her anger tangled with a sudden spike of nervousness. Giddily, Leia thought, _Get in line, buddy, because I want answers, too._ She grabbed his shoulders and froze, caught between pushing him away and pulling him closer. Her fingers tightened in the fabric of his shirt, and she took a shaky breath. “I… It’s a long story, Han,” she admitted, her eyes searching his.

The fire in his eyes had changed to something else, something smoldering that lit an answering warmth in the pit of Leia’s stomach. Han’s hand came up to pry one of Leia’s hands away, though he just held it to his chest. “I’m listening,” he said.

Between one quick breath and the next, the choice was made. She leaned up on her toes and kissed him. He answered her with no hesitation, his lips parting and moving against hers. The warmth in her belly turned to a prickling heat as his free hand caught her waist and pulled her into the shadow of a column. And oh, she had not realized that kissing Han Solo would be like this, not an argument solved with lips and hands, but like jumping into freefall, each trusting the other would catch them.

When the kiss broke, she caught her breath with her face pressed to his chest, not ready to face this just yet. She felt his hand in her hair, tilting her head back, then he ducked his head down to meet her eyes. “Leia?” he said, and it was the soft, slightly startled intonation that got her.

She let out her breath in one long exhale, her eyes tracing over Han’s face. She might have given him the whole truth, then, but she heard her mother calling her name. She jumped back from Han, turning her head towards the house. “I have to go,” she said.

When she stopped to look back, Han was leaning casually on the column, looking out at the lake. His face was unreadable, but she thought she sensed a storm underneath.

She would have time for this later.

“You’re just who I wanted to talk to,” Leia said, catching Padmé at the doorway. “I need to pick your brain.”

* * *

“That floor’s pretty sturdy, but you’re going to wear it out at this rate.”

Han’s head snapped up at the dry voice and he made himself hold still. Anakin Skywalker leaned against the door into the sunroom, eyes crinkled with amusement. If Han was being honest, he still wasn’t used to that.

He hadn’t seen Leia since the previous afternoon. She hadn’t even come out of whatever study she was holed up in for dinner. It wasn’t the most awkward dinner Han had ever been at, but it came close: a war hero, a politician, an overly curious teenager, and a pair of no-good smugglers. Chewie seemed to have no problem making friends, even if some of them needed the protocol droid to translate. Han had kept his head down and escaped as soon as possible.

Anakin didn’t wait for Han’s reply. “I know. You’re stuck cooling your heels here.”

“I gotta get into town,” Han said. “Most of the fixes on the Falcon will be easy enough, but I got a part needs replacing before I can do anything else.”

Anakin’s eyes sharpened. Han hadn’t actually expected the deflection to work. “Tell me what you need and I’ll get it in. You won’t get a better price.”

“Yeah? You got contacts?” Han looked Anakin over, crossing his arms.

Anakin rolled his eyes. “Solo, I’m the local mechanic.”

Han must have misheard. “You’re the…?”

“Best in the area.” Anakin sounded smug. Han had honestly thought the shop out back was a rich man’s plaything, as useful as it had been to him. He found himself re-evaluating Anakin Skywalker. He knew he wasn’t a member of the Jedi Order or Republic military anymore; it had been news everywhere at the time. It had never occurred to him to wonder what he did with his time now.

“Couldn’t just rest, huh?” Han asked.

“Can you?” Anakin said cheerfully. “Come on, I could use a hand.”

Han half-expected Anakin to lead him into the shop. Instead, he followed the older man to a sun-lit kitchen. It had wide counters, and though they had eaten on the terrace last night, the table set by one of the windows clearly saw use.

Anakin was already moving through the kitchen with purpose, pulling down bowls and stopping to rummage in the conservator. Han hovered until Anakin shoved a bundle of vegetables and a knife his way and said, “Start chopping.”

Han didn’t argue, and when Anakin whisked the vegetables away and tossed them into a hissing pan, Han didn’t argue with the next task either. He was still struggling with a sense of wrongness; he kept expecting the Anakin Skywalker he’d heard about to show up. This one commented on his daughters’ schedules as he cooked what was shaping up to be a magnificent lunch.

“Can I ask you something?” Han asked abruptly.

Anakin glanced up from his work with a raised eyebrow. “Sure.”

“Are you…” He was having trouble phrasing the question, already regretting asking it. He changed tack very slightly. “How did you end up…here?”

“You asking for a story, or is this one restless pilot asking another what it’s like to settle down?”

Han’s ears burned. Anakin’s eyes on him were too sharp, too knowing. “I’m not trying to give up the smuggling life or anything,” he blustered. “It just seems pretty different, that’s all.”

His skin crawled as Anakin looked him over, as if the other man was looking for his own answers. Finally, Anakin nodded.

“Come here.” Han moved across the kitchen to Anakin warily, only to have the spoon shoved in his hand. “Just watch it for me.” Anakin brushed past him, clattering around behind him. “If you want the short version of the story, I wasn’t supposed to be married to Padmé when I was still in the Jedi Order. That all came out not long after Leia and her brother were born, and things got, uh, messy with the Order. They let me stay because they needed me”—Han heard that self-satisfaction in his voice again— “but after the war ended, it didn’t really make much sense for me to stay there.”

“You could’ve done anything,” Han pointed out.

“Exactly,” Anakin said.

“And you’re cooking lunch.”

“Have you ever tasted fish from Naboo? You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted fish from Naboo. Listen, Solo, I spent almost a decade on the front lines of a war. Before that, I didn’t lead a peaceful life either. Just because I like a good fight doesn’t mean I want to spend my life doing it, given the choice.”

“Some people don’t have much of a choice,” Han muttered.

“Yeah,” Anakin said. “I know.” The lightness that had been in his voice before was gone. “Solo…”

Han considered not answering, then said, “Yeah?”

“I don’t know what your story is and I don’t know who you’ve got out there. But if you ever want to make a different choice, and you need a friend, let me know.”

Han heaved an exasperated sigh. “I’m not a charity case, Skywalker.”

“Good thing that’s not what I’m offering,” Anakin said. “I heard about your record at the Academy, and it’s pretty clear the kind of circles you’re in now. For all I know, you’re happy as a bantha rolling in sand. The fact that you needed to know our cargo wasn’t anything alive gives me hope, but I know what kinds of people get involved with the Hutts.”

Han’s hand jerked, the spoon clacking against the side of the pot. “Who told you I’m working with the Hutts?” he said suspiciously.

Anakin sighed. “Great. You are. I’d hoped that one wasn’t true.”

“Who told you about the _Academy_?” Han went on, not even listening, turning to face Anakin with the spoon held out accusingly.

Anakin crossed his arms and leaned against the counter. “Solo, you’re a brilliant flyer and you have a good head for negotiation. _You_ could be doing anything, but you’re running contraband for the Hutts. Is that where you want to be?”

“I don’t go anywhere I don’t want to be,” Han said. He dropped the spoon and stormed out of the kitchen. He was just at the door when he heard Anakin’s voice behind him, sounding amused.

“You must really want to be here, then.”


	6. Light the Match

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leia's request for action goes poorly. Han follows up on that kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updated tags for mild sexual content, be aware.

The clink of a plate being set on her desk broke Leia’s concentration. She blinked as she tried to pull her thoughts from her research.

“You need a break,” Padmé said kindly. “And to eat something.” Leia registered the smell of fish, and her stomach grumbled at her.

“Right,” Leia said. 

Padmé settled into a second chair with a rustle of skirts, her eyes skimming over Leia. She frowned. “Is it that bad?” she asked. 

“It makes me furious,” Leia said. “Slavery was bad enough, but I’ve been looking into the minerals they mine. It’s mostly a type of crystal used in ion engine manufacture, but the chemical processing it has to go through…” She shook her head. “No one there was wearing enough protective gear. Not even the paid workers. The exposure Han and I had should be fine, but for the workers, over time, the health problems are only going to build up. Even the dust in the mines is toxic.”

“Do they know?” Padmé said, shifting as if she wanted to get up and look for herself. She stopped herself and settled back into place.

“Lero has to,” Leia said. “The information is all there in Republic geological surveys and safety guidelines. Most planets with deposits use droids and take measures to prevent runoff. There are laws in place that are supposed to stop this. How many minor systems like this are slipping through our fingers?”

“Too many,” Padmé said. Her lips tightened. “I’ve seen it too many times.”

“There has to be some way,” Leia said. “How could we not know about them? They’re practically our neighbors.”

“I understand how it happened all too well,” Padmé said. She stood and moved behind Leia’s chair, putting her hands on her shoulders. “It’s so easy to lose track of the small picture, of local wrongs and disputes, when you’re working with the Senate.”

“How did you do it?” Leia asked. “How did you keep track of it all?”

“You can’t. Not all of it. That’s the most frustrating part of the job,” Padmé said softly. “When I work on Naboo, our problems start to eclipse the full picture of the Republic. And when I worked in the Senate, it was always a fight to keep in mind the local effects of the decisions we made. You have to focus on your own work, but you also have to find a balance. And friends who can tell you what’s happening where you aren’t looking.”

Padmé must have seen the frustration in Leia’s face, because she reached out and nudged the plate towards her. “Eat, while it’s still warm. And go walk out in the sun for a little. Don’t you have that meeting with Senator Farsel?”

She did, and Padmé was right. Leia felt refreshed when she returned to her desk. When her holoprojector pinged, Leia answered it with a mask of poise firmly in place. 

“Leia, I was most intrigued by your request for a meeting,” Farsel said after they had greeted each other. They were a dark-skinned human, dressed in simple but beautifully tailored pale robes, with their mass of coal-colored braids swept up into a towering hairstyle. There had been a Senate session on their calendar earlier that day; Leia suspected Farsel had come straight from there. “After all,” the senator went on, “I was under the impression you were on holiday.” Their face was serious; Leia always had trouble reading them. The other aides sometimes joked that if Farsel ever gave up politics, they could make a killing on the sabacc circuit.

“Senator, you know how it is,” Leia said. “Nothing ever goes to plan. The universe has to have its laugh, after all.”

“Tell me,” Farsel said, folding their hands in front of them.

“There’s a situation in the Alui sector I want Coruscant’s eyes on,” Leia said, and laid out her case so far. 

“Slave-holding is a grave offense,” Farsel said. “Historically, the Republic has relied upon local agencies and the Jedi to enforce those laws. Have you tried speaking to either?”

“Karstan Lero is the planetary leader of a Republic member world,” Leia said, trying to smother the spark of outrage at Farsel’s measured reply. “He falls well within Judicial’s jurisdiction. With all due respect, going after him would be a perfect opportunity to make a statement on the Republic’s stance on slavery.”

“You were not here when we negotiated the peace, but I am certain you understand that our relationship with the Alui sector’s senator is very delicate,” Farsel said. “We must proceed with caution.”

“Bring him in on it! Let him clean his house if he doesn’t want the Republic to do it for him,” Leia said.

“I will judge the wisdom of such a move.” Farsel’s voice was suddenly very cold, and Leia sat straight in her seat, catching her breath and her emotion. Control, Leia, she reminded herself. Farsel was still the decision-maker. Finding herself at odds with them would affect not just her job, but Queen Parahar’s plans. She could not give in to her temper.

“I only suggest,” Leia said, choosing each word deliberately, “that a loyal Republic Senator would, of course, wish to correct such an oversight. If a leader of one of his worlds continues to traffic in slaves and wrongfully imprison decorated Republic soldiers, someone else might find out. Would he not want to place himself firmly on the right side of this?”

Leia knew, and Farsel knew, that Senator Rine would not find Lero’s actions particularly offensive. He had risen up from the customs authority that ruled Enarc during its Separatist days. The question was how much he cared about the appearance of sincere devotion — and how far Farsel was willing to push him.

Her heart sank when Farsel replied, “Send me your witness statements and whatever documentation you have. I will review them.” 

It was a reply that meant the aides would review them, at a priority somewhere lower than budget reports and the Senator’s calendar. It promised nothing except a long wait. It also promised that Farsel would not discuss this further until their review was complete.

“You will depart at the end of the week?” Farsel said, an uncharacteristic uncertainty hanging in their tone.

“I will let you know if my plans change,” Leia said.

When the call ended, Leia gripped the edge of her desk and gritted her teeth and resisted, firmly resisted, the urge to scream in frustration. Farsel always had far too much to do and always avoided new issues for as long as possible in favor of ongoing projects and committees. Leia had thought she understood this; rebuilding was their focus, and it was long, hard work. But to let such an injustice stand? Not even to promise Leia a way forward?

Leia could go to the Jedi. They were her best bet to help Magorre’s slaves; that had to be the priority right now. But as long as the Republic avoided taking a strong stance on slavery, avoided actively campaigning against it, it would only find a new place to fester if one was cleaned out. It made Leia sick.

She had only been to Tatooine a few times.

The first was just after Sisi was born. Her parents had always taken them away from the Temple when they could, for a week or two spent together on Coruscant or, in less desperate portions of the war, on Naboo. But now peace, or at least a ceasefire, had settled over the galaxy, and Padmé sat the twins down to explain to them that they were going to their father’s birthplace.

“Tatooine?” Luke had asked, eyes wide, as he huddled against Padmé’s side. “I’ve never heard him talk about Tatooine.”

“He doesn’t like to talk about it,” Padmé said. “Things were very hard for him there.” Slavery had been, if not a new concept, not something they had understood well at eight years old. Padmé explained as well as she could, so that they would understand why Anakin was not entirely happy to be going back to visit his family there. “But we want you to know who your aunt and uncle are,” Padmé said. “We want them to meet you.”

Her eyes were shadowed with something that Leia couldn’t understand, and she was afraid. It was almost anticlimactic arriving at the dusty farm to find two perfectly normal, kind human beings. They spoiled Luke and Leia and cooed over the baby and looked at Anakin with uncertain eyes, their conversation stilted whenever Leia overheard just the grown-ups talking.

Leia found Anakin outside on the third night, standing at the top of a rise to watch the fading bruise of the sunset on the horizon. She stood beside him until he reached his hand down for hers.

“Don’t they like you?” she asked finally, still puzzling over her aunt and uncle’s reactions to Anakin. Padmé and Sola, like Luke and Leia, always had something to say to each other, were always in each other’s space, trading smiles and jokes. Owen was Anakin’s brother, she thought.

There was a long pause. “We didn’t grow up together,” Anakin said. “I don’t think Owen knows what to do with me.”

“Why?”

“I left here when I was about your age,” Anakin said quietly. “It was just me and my mom then. It wasn’t…” Leia looked up at her father. He never tried to scare them, but he never lied to them to protect them, either. It was always comforting to Leia, who hated most not knowing. 

Anakin settled onto the cooling sand and pulled Leia into his lap. His arm reached over her shoulder and pointed. “I lived off that way,” he said. “In a town called Mos Espa. We didn’t always live there, but we got sold to a junk dealer there, and he treated us all right, I guess. But we always knew he could give us away or sell us again. We didn’t even belong to ourselves, much less each other.” Leia shifted, confused by the way he’d said that. He wrapped his arm around her. “You don’t live with us,” he said. “But we chose that, because it was safer. If my mom and I ever got separated, we couldn’t decide to go find each other. We had that taken away from us. Everyone like us has that taken away from them.”

Leia frowned. “Are there people like that now? Here?”

“Not out on the moisture farms,” he said. “Most farmers can’t afford it. But in the towns? There’s whole sections where just slaves live.”

Leia didn’t want to think about that; there was an anxious clawing in her belly at the idea. “You’re not a slave now,” she said. “Anyway, that doesn’t explain why he doesn’t like you. You’re brothers now, right?”

“He grew up free. He only knew my mother after his father freed her. I’m part of her past. I’m a reminder of what she spent most of her life dealing with. And of how she died. Of everything wrong with this planet.” Anakin’s voice was raw by the end of the sentence, though he didn’t shout. Leia wrapped her hands around his arm, holding on, unsure how else to comfort him.

“Sorry,” he whispered, brushing a kiss against her hair. He held her, rocking her gently, and Leia felt reassured. “I think he thinks family is who stays with you,” Anakin said after a few minutes. “I left.”

“You came back,” Leia said. She twisted to look up at him. “You always come back.”

Anakin smiled down at her, a real smile for the first time since they’d come to Tatooine. “And I always will,” he promised her.

She didn’t find out how Shmi Skywalker had died until years later. She rarely spoke to Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen, but they sent messages on birthdays. She had even been to visit on her own once, when she was sixteen. But there would always be this between them: the broken Skywalker family, and Anakin’s anger about his childhood. 

That anger filled Leia now. Across the galaxy, stories like his, with families like his, were playing out all over again. There had been a full generation, a war, Padmé’s own efforts and those of her friends, and nothing had changed. “It has to end,” she whispered to herself, a rock-hard resolve settling around her. “I have to end it.”

* * *

There was a dark shape against the blue of the lake. A shape so familiar it set Han’s heart beating faster. He caught a glimpse through the window in the dying light of evening and moved towards the nearest door outside without stopping to think. What if she disappeared again before he had a chance to…what? It hardly mattered, except that he needed to see her.

She turned at the rustle of his boots in the grass, and he stopped, standing there with his hands in his pockets. 

Leia was different here. Though he’d had only a few glimpses, their kiss that first night had remained seared in his memory, haunting his thoughts. On the Falcon and on Magorre, she had looked dangerously practical, almost severe. She was as soft as a flower now in a dress that caught and floated in the breeze. A curl of hair, escaped from its style, twisted in the same breeze. 

He wanted to reach out and smooth it behind her ear.

“You were right, you know,” she said, her voice rough honey.

“Of course I was.” He frowned. “About what?”

“There isn’t much a senator’s aide can do,” she said. 

The bitterness in her voice broke through his daze, and he moved closer. “Hey, now. I don’t know much about aides, but I know you.”

“Do you?” Leia turned her face up to his, her eyes blazing. “You don’t know a thing about me.”

“Sure I do,” Han said, and his fingers followed his impulse, tucking that rogue lock of hair behind her ear. She closed her eyes, leaning into his hand. He stepped closer. “I wouldn’t stand between you and what you wanted, that’s for damn sure,” he said. “Anyone who does has another thing coming.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Leia said, and Han hated the dismissal in her tone so much he kissed her just to stop hearing it. Her hands closed on the front of his jacket and she used the leverage to push up into the kiss. The fierceness took his breath away, every bit of the fire in her personality spilling out in her kiss. He wanted to fight back, and he wanted to let her take everything.

The kiss ended as abruptly as it had begun. Leia pulled away to stare at him, still catching her breath. His hand was still on her cheek.

“Do you want to know why I came after you?” she said, her voice low and full of some emotion he couldn’t name.

Han frowned. This wasn’t how he expected to get his answers. “Sure,” he said cautiously.

“Because everything, everything that changed because Palpatine died, is because some version of me was so determined to fix the wrongs in her history she found a way to travel back in time.” Leia’s voice rose, her words spilling out faster and faster. “Her life was awful, she lost everything I care about, so why am I so jealous of her?”

Han caught Leia’s face in both of his hands, staring into her eyes. He had no idea what the hell she was talking about, but she looked ready to break. “I dunno,” he rumbled. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Her breath caught in something close to a sob, and suddenly she wrapped her arms around his waist, clinging on. “She broke the rules of the universe to make things right,” she said into his shirt. “I’m stuck at the whims of a Senator who just wants stability.”

“So start breaking some rules,” Han said.

Leia laughed and didn’t move away, and Han had a moment to tick back through what she had said. After a moment, he stiffened. “Uh. Time travel?”

“I have the messages she left me if you want them,” Leia said, muffled. 

“What does that have to do with…”

Leia looked up at him, her eyes a little wet, but looking steadier than before. Certain. “In another world,” she said softly, “in a time when the galaxy was plunged into darkness, you were one of my lights.” She rested a hand on his chest, her eyes searching his face. “I saw her face. My face. I wanted to know what she saw that made her feel like that.”

Han swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. “You…”

“I don’t know what this is,” Leia said. “But you frustrate me, you challenge me, you drive me wild, and yet…” She leaned up, giving him a kiss so short he had no time to respond. “I feel I can rest here. Can you?”

This had just gotten a lot more serious than Han had expected. He felt like he had been chasing her, only for her to turn and spring a trap on him. But he didn’t want to step out of that trap. His chest felt too full, his throat tight. He ducked his head, answering her with a slow kiss, taking his time to learn her this time. She shifted in his arms, then groaned into his mouth, and that tiny sound filled his world. He buried his hand in her hair and together they stumbled against a tree, clinging to each other as the universe narrowed to just this, just her hands sliding flat over his back, her tongue clever and searching, the warm weight of her against his front. 

Her hair was tumbling down around their faces by the time they could pull apart long enough for words. There was a flowery, tangy scent to it, and he buried his face in her neck to breathe it in, to breathe her in. “I don’t want to stop,” he said quietly. “But you did bring me to your parents’ house.”

She laughed, suddenly, sharp and startled. He looked up and found her looking at him with a mischievous glint in her eyes. “Is your bunk on the Falcon any bigger than the crew quarters?” 

“Not much,” he admitted.

“Well,” she said. “It’ll just have to do, won’t it?”

He would have liked the transition from kissing to bed to be as short as possible, preferably with his hands never leaving her body. Unfortunately, it instead included a lot of undignified and probably unnecessary sneaking around the perimeter of the house until they got to the open space where the Falcon rested. She whisper-laughed as he fumbled to get the boarding ramp open, and he looked down at her.

The way her eyes looked when she laughed took his breath away. Less than ten minutes ago, she had been in pain, refusing to ask for help. He never wanted to stop making that change happen. “Hey,” he said, drawing her close as the ramp started to open. He tipped his forehead against hers. “Whatever it is, you’ll figure it out. But tonight, I want you to forget it. Okay?”

Her breath caught, and he wondered if she felt as shaky as he did. “I can do that,” she said. Then her hands pressed flat against his chest and she pushed him backwards up the ramp, her lips finding his again. They half stumbled down the cramped corridors; his shoulder bounced off a wall, and he spun her around. 

“Let me lead for once,” he said, grinning down at her, before he kissed her again.

Clothes were another obstacle; he couldn’t tell how her dress fastened. But he lost his breath all over again as she found the hidden clasps and the dress slid off a little at a time, revealing first a pale shoulder, then her back, then everything all at once as the last clasp gave and it fell to the floor. He was shirtless by then, just getting his second boot off, and it fell from his fingers with a clunk. 

They came together again with a shock of skin on skin, and Han realized just how little of hers he’d felt. He couldn’t stop touching her; his hands found the curve of her neck, the planes of her shoulders, the dip at her waist that felt made for his hands. She pushed him back towards the bed, and he went without protest, pulling her down with him. It wasn’t a bed made for sharing, and he nearly banged his head against the wall before she settled over his hips, her hands already working at his waistband.

Han reached up, wrapping his hands around her wrists. “You’re sure about this?” he said. 

Leia looked down at him, startled. “Are you?” she said, her legs tensing as if she was prepared to move off him. He released her arms, then smoothed his hands over her thighs until he could rest them on her hips. 

“Damn sure,” he said. He didn’t tell her that he didn’t want to do this only to find her done with him in the morning. She seemed to see something in his face, though, because she leaned down and kissed him, one hand cupping the side of his neck. He caught her against him, and her hands worked between him, finally doing away with the last of his clothes.

“I’m sure about this,” Leia whispered, and it was all Han needed. He kissed her, drinking in the heat of her body, the thrill of anticipation, and a heart-stopping hope that after all of this, she would be here with him.

* * *

This time, when Leia woke to the warmth of Han’s body cradling hers, she let herself enjoy it. She nearly drifted off to sleep again before she felt Han shift beside her. Lips pressed against the back of her neck, and she shivered.

“Morning,” she murmured, and turned to face him.

Han’s eyes were barely half-open, but he smiled at her, a dopey grin that wasn’t even trying to be cool. Her heart turned over in her chest, and she leaned forward, pressing kisses along his jaw until he turned his head and caught her lips with his. 

When they finally broke apart, Leia was breathless. She tucked her head against Han’s shoulder and sighed. “That’s certainly a way to take your mind off things,” she said dryly.

“Well, if it works,” Han replied. His hand slid through her hair, tracing a gentle path down her spine, before it came to rest against the small of her back. “Does that mean I can persuade you not to think for a little longer?”

“Mm.” Leia twisted to look at the chronometer. Breakfast time. Everyone would be up and about; Sisi wouldn’t leave for school for another half an hour. “You can certainly persuade me to stay.”

But her mind was working already, returning to the same snarls she had left behind last night. Senator Farsel wouldn’t help her, not yet. Leia wanted to be able to force the Senate to do something about this, but even as a representative she would have no voting power and no ability to introduce bills unless Farsel left her in their place, and no right to sit on committees. She could not simply demand this power; it would undo years of work. She could not approach this as a full member of the Senate would.

She would have to do what thousands of lobbyists, activists, and other interested parties did: get the ears of those with the power to make change. Persuade them to help. She knew how; she had been doing it on Farsel’s behalf for years. And in the meantime, see to the immediate need.

She was going to have to make so many calls.

“Hey.” Han’s voice broke into her thoughts, and she met his eyes, startled. He raised an eyebrow, and she laughed.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s been like…not quite like a dream, but another life, chasing you and then Chewie.”

Something around Han’s eyes tightened. “Back to your real life,” he said.

“That’s not…” Leia paused, then realized what was happening. She wrapped an arm around his neck, pulling him closer. “Han, no. I like this. I want it to keep happening. I thought I was pretty clear last night.”

“People say a lot of things at night they don’t mean in the morning.”

“If anything, I should be the one having this crisis,” Leia said. “You didn’t promise me anything.” Not in so many words. But his actions, and what he had said, everything about the way he touched her and looked at her, had told her enough. 

Maybe some things needed to be said.

“Our lives are very different,” Leia said. “I don’t think either of us is about to give theirs up, but right now things are…up in the air for me.”

“They are?” Han said, and there was a spark of hope in his eyes.

“I was offered a position as a representative in the Senate,” Leia said. “Not a senator, but someone with a little more voice. And then… And then you. Everything about working with you reminded me how much I had forgotten, staying on Coruscant.”

She ran a finger down the center of his chest, not quite ready to see his reaction to this. “I still think it’s important to fight for a better galaxy.”

Han sighed and pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You’re starting to make me believe it.”

Leia pulled away, searching his face. He looked tired, rueful, but not at all like he was joking. “We could try,” she said, her heart in her throat. “We could try together.”

Han looked away, and she was afraid she’d pushed too far. Then he huffed out a breath through his nose. “So what does that look like? Free Magorre?”

“I have some ideas for Magorre,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads up: I might be taking a break after this chapter. I've got a deadline coming up for another fic and have been concentrating on writing that.
> 
> Also hey! They're finally on the same page. Hope y'all enjoyed this chapter, because it was a ball to write.


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